Playing mind games with words 2 Edition

• Published in: Herald (Glasgow, Scotland)
• Main Author: Cooper, Neil
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Glasgow (UK) Newsquest (Herald & Times) Ltd 06.03.2001
• Subjects: Paterson, Don (1963-)

Award-winning poet Don Paterson speaks to Neil Cooper about his first stage foray Tales of ordinary madness are everywhere. Of course, we all know someone who's "mad", "bonkers", "a loose cannon". But these are just the noisy guys down the pub, having a laugh in that slightly unhinged way guys like that do. But they're not mad. Not really. "Mad", really mad, is like you see in films, where the local big-wigs are charmingly eccentric in that impeccably upper- crust way they have, or else are pop-eyed psychos with axes to grind, usually in the pretty face of the local beauty queen. The play's blue-collar feel is reminiscent of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but without the counter-cultural intent of both Ken Kesey's novel and Milos Forman's film adaptation, which saw the screen set alight by Jack Nich-olson's portrayal of Randall McMurphy, the agent provocateur at loggerheads with an archaic and inhumane psychiatric system. If there is a McMurphy figure in The Land Of Cakes, it's [Archie], who sets in motion among his fellow residents some sense of self- determination beyond the raffia-work provided by occupational therapists. At one point, Archie even refers to Cuckoo's Nest. The "other circumstance" Paterson talks about is, of course, his poetry, which, through books such as Nil Nil, God's Gift To Women, and The Eyes have found him exploring similarly down-home themes as in The Land Of Cakes, but in an altogether pithier, denser, more chiselled fashion, that has seen him deservedly feted by a literary establishment that, beyond fly-by-night trends of the "poetry is the new rock'n'roll" persuasion that were bandied about a few years ago, has garlanded him with prizes, including the T S Eliot and Forward Poetry prizes, while more recently he was short-listed for the Whitbread Poetry Award.