Toy Fights: A Boyhood - 'A classic of its kind' William Boyd

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Paterson has the obsessive’s geeky enthusiasm for whatever he is detailing, be it the Osmonds’s Crazy Horses achieving a particular synth effect (“a Yamaha YC-30 with a ribbon control, yes I know you don’t care”) or the beauty of an Akira Yoshizawa origami fold. This tends to entertain, though it can also alienate. But then a reader could likely enjoy Toy Fights for its author’s facility with simile alone. An early musical inspiration “looked disconcertingly like a reflection of Rolf Harris’s actual soul”, while “the David Brent of jazz” plays like “ Mr Bean practising air piano”. Baywatch blonde Donna D'Errico, 55, bares cleavage in sultry Halloween look as she BLASTS 'women haters' adding they can 'kiss my a**' In the UK, Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. Everyone should read Douglas Dunn. Of the North Americans, too many: Kay Ryan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Billy Collins, Terrance Hayes, Timothy Donnelly and Karen Solie. Jury is out on the younger cats.

Don Paterson: ‘The temptation is to sit on my backside’ Don Paterson: ‘The temptation is to sit on my backside’

Loose Women star looks completely UNRECOGNISABLE in horrifying costume for Halloween special... but can you guess who it is? The idea first came, he says, as a book about his life as a working musician, “daft life-on-the-road stuff. I thought it would be nice to collect all the anecdotes. And that was met with some enthusiasm by my publisher, because it wasn’t poetry! And then I just couldn’t face it. Because when I started to remember, it was, oh God, this isn’t the book that was commissioned at all.” In the end Paterson felt he couldn’t write it before certain things in his life happened, “principally my father dying”. There have already been lazy comparisons to Douglas Stuart’s heartbreaking novel Shuggie Bain, but while a poet as gifted as Paterson is at least as lyrical as Stuart, Toy Fights is not about familial violence, nor the kind of widespread brutality found in 1980s Glasgow. Family, the working class, money, swearing, love, schizophrenia, football, sugar, narcissists, origami – “this book is about a lot of things”, Paterson reflects, “but is notably music-obsessed”.Helen Flanagan's daughterMatilda, seven, hilariously lets slip her mum is dating again - one year after she split from ex Scott Sinclair Sophia Bush recalls TERRIFYING paranormal experience while living with Austin Nichols in 'creepy haunted apartment': 'We both started to scream!' Don Paterson is not a poet whose work you will often hear described as memoiristic. The three time Forward Prize winner is best known for the formal control and metaphysical scope of his verse. It is not the kind of poetry that is “ like a bar-room singer, boastful / with its own huge feeling, or drowned by violins”. Indeed, anyone who has battled through Paterson’s treatise on poetic theory, P oem: Lyric, Sign, Meter – a tome that might be more appropriately titled Poetry’s Answer to String Theory– would know Paterson conceives of the form less as a substitute for a diary entry, more as “a machine for remembering itself.” Yet, in this debut memoir Paterson mines the biographical facts of his childhood and adolescence to moving effect.

Toy Fights” – Chicago Review of Books Avoiding Boredom in “Toy Fights” – Chicago Review of Books

Kelly Ripa is pretty in pink as Barbie and her husband Mark Consuelos dons stripes as Ken for their Halloween special on Live With Kelly & Mark The most harrowing section of the book is an account of Paterson’s descent into madness. He sets off one day to buy some hash, of which he is by now consuming an epic amount, from one of the many doss houses around which his and his friends’ social life revolved. Paterson’s father was a part-time musician, who worked for the publisher DC Thomson, colouring the comic strips for Beano and The Dandy.

As for his politics, ‘I can’t stand the Right, I can’t stand the Left and I really can’t stand the appeasing, quietist, weedy, status quo “liberal” centre’. And never forget, he says, the ‘staggering indifference of both Right and Left elites towards the poor I grew up among’. Banged Up review: This prison 'experiment' is just a shabby excuse to torment celebs, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS