Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. Sometimes when you discover a new

poem, having read several of their poems, you then realize that they write prose stuff,

they write criticism, and you go off and have a look at that. Sometimes it throws light

on their particular poetry and sometimes on poetry in general. With today's poet Don

Patterson, things were the other way around. I bought what I'm going to describe as a

big fat book called, I want to get the title exactly right so I'm going to open up and

get it. It's called, the poem, lyric sign meter, and it's about poetry in all its aspects.

And when I looked, I found it, I'll be honest. I hope if Don Patterson ever hears this, he

won't be upset to know that it was in a second hand shop, although it was an Oxfam shop,

so my purchase of it helped someone down the line. But I had to look at the preface to

see what it would be like. And it warned me in the preface that the second section of the book,

called, sign, is as Don Patterson explains, necessarily, and miserably, dense. And I thought

this is the book for me. So I got that with the same spirit of challenge that I bought G.K.

Chesterton's best off on eBay, having read a review that said, boring and old-fashioned.

I thought this is the book for me. Anyway, Don Patterson's, the poem, lyric sign, meter.

He's very much not boring and old-fashioned. And I think then when I started reading his

poetry, it gave me a confidence in him that he was worth pursuing, and that if I didn't find

my way through a poem immediately, I would do and the search would be worthwhile.

Which brings me to probably Don Patterson's most famous poem, and it's called Rain,

and it was written in 2009. It was the title poem of a collection called Rain by Don Patterson

from that year. I'm going to jump straight in. I will tell you, though, in the spirit of the

Don Patterson preface to that big fat poetry book that it took me a long time, and the work

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