Toy Fights
A Boyhood

Of all the things on God's great earth Don Paterson has been tasked with doing, poetry is the one thing he is really, really good at. He's a more than passable musician, and can put away tablet like nobody's business but if you were to get a group of people together, let's say a million, no, make it......more

Don Paterson has long been my favourite contemporary poet, as much for his wit and eloquence as for anything else. I was looking forward to reading this autobiography, not realising that it didn’t even take us up to the beginning of his career as a poet. Nonetheless, I loved it. It was, as predicted......more

I've long been an admirer of the poetry of Don Paterson, one of Scotland's and the UK's greatest living poets. I'm also a fan of his book of aphorisms, in which he targets the pretentious. However in "Toy Fights", a memoir of the first 20 years of his life, there is barely a mention of poetry: his i......more

An absorbing and fascinating read. Patterson is a master of opinionated social commentary that is laced on almost every page with metaphoric wit and vocabulary that blew mine out of the water ! So many colourful, descriptive words that stopped me in my tracks.... "she was given to hypocoristic squea......more

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, possibly because areas of it overlapped with my student years in Dundee and there were mentions of some folk I knew back then. But it was also well written in an easy to relate to style which included many accurate observations of ordinary everyday items, human behavi......more