Don Paterson is a poet who relishes large, sometimes intimidating themes. Yet the expression his poems wear is poker-faced with a hint of mockery. With irony, rhythmic bravura and word-play as his weapons and sometimes shield, he is especially drawn to subjects associated with existentialism and negative theology: the apparent absence of immanent meaning, the fated vanishing of the world, and yet also the continual sense of virtual possibilities, imagined alternatives. His poetry's value and distinction, on this chapter's reading, derive from his exploration of the challenge posed by, and the frail but durable value latent in, ‘nothing’ and its associations. The thirty-fourth ‘Renku’ in Rain offers a slyly oblique comment on Paterson's work as a whole:

Much of Paterson's finest poetry celebrates its ‘birthday’, in the sense of its coming into being through contemplation of non-being. Riskily and bravely, the work assumes the rhetorical glamour of a mode of seeing the world and yet intimates that it is merely offering a style in the face of despair. The lure of ‘nothingness’ also lies in the way it can rebuke the intellect that would dissect, murder an imaginative effect by asserting a meaning. It lies, too, in the way it beckons to its shadowy opposite, ‘something’ ‘nothing’, in Paterson's poetry, is trying on occasion to convert itself into an imaginative and near-religious (and post-Romantic) ‘something’.

One crucial form that ‘nothing’ and ‘nothingness’ take in Paterson's poetry is absence. Other forms of ‘nothing’, often entwining round one another, include a yearning after negative transcendence, a measured delight in the possibilities of uncertainty, a confrontation with non-meaning, and the question of the relationship between the ‘nothings’ of imagination and a reality detected as lying beyond the scope of language, even as it is language that, paradoxically, allows us to sense what may lie beyond itself. Paterson's work suggests that its author is aware of being the heir of other poets who have wrestled with cognate themes of ‘nothingness’ accordingly, this chapter will connect his work with a range of Romantic and post-Romantic writers to show how his poetry's success derives from daring raids on deep-seated cultural fears and hopes, both contemporary and long-standing.