Award-winning Dundee poet Don Paterson has shown he has little love for city planners in one of his acclaimed sonnets.
Don Paterson, who won the Costa Poetry Prize for his work 40 Sonnets, includes a stinging attack on city planners who, he claims, have mistaken “urban regeneration with a post-apocalypse”.
One of 40 Sonnets’ poems is called To Dundee City Council, a furious broadside against successive administrations.
It begins: “Fair play. Round here, only junkies walk/so it’s unfair that I affect my shock/at this last straw: that fine baronial stair/you found cheaper to fence off than to repair”.
The poem concludes with the dismissively sarcastic line: “Farewell! Good luck with the V&A.”
Inan interview with The Herald, The poet said he “loves Dundee” but is dismayed about some of the decisions made by planners over the decades.
He said: “I have watched them (the council) for 52 years confuse urban regeneration with a post-apocalypse. I just sort of threw my hands up in the air.”
Mr Paterson, who grew up in St Mary’s, added: “Dundee is absolutely part of me.There is something about your childhood territory that is always going to make it your primal imaginative terrain.
“And there is something about the experiences you had at the most self conscious times of your life, like secondary school, that will always stay with you.”
Although an award-winning poet, Paterson is branching out into other forms of literature writing a play about one of Jimmy Savile’s victims and a memoir about his time growing up in Dundee.
A spokeswoman for Dundee City Council said: “Dundee has a proud literary tradition, in which poetry has played an important part. The city is renowned for its strong voices and expressions of varied opinions, which we as a council welcome, whether they are in verse, prose or song.”
Mr Paterson also ruled out the possibility of replacing Liz Lochhead as Scotland’s Makar, or national poet.
He said: “It’s a role that comes with certain expectations and it would be crazy to take on that role and just not meet them.”
Mr Paterson was raised in Dundee and has won a number of prizes, including the Whitbread poetry award, the Geoffrey Faber memorial prize and all three Forward prizes.
He is currently the only poet to have won the TS Eliot prize twice.