Reading a collection, poems sometimes seem to signal to one another. In Don Paterson’s 40 Sonnets, his first book since Rain, which won the 2009 Forward prize, there is a recurring sense of a shoreline. Wave makes this explicit and is a perfect subject for a sonnet, the form a seawall. I love the unlaboured wit, gathering momentum, human appropriation of water, the moment of breaking as a “full confession” and the effortlessly achieved (although I bet it wasn’t): “I was nothing but a fold in her blue gown” – a beautiful line. And I love the acceleration at the end, the sense of completion, with the sea crashing into town like a joyrider.

The opening sonnet, Here, is a conventional piece in heroic couplets, elegantly forming itself around an unconventional subject: a defective heart calling out to a first heart – a mother’s. Again, there is a sense of the littoral: “my dear sea up in arms at the wrong shore/ and her loud heart like a landlord at the door.” Nostalgia offers a further cresting of a wave: “I miss when I was the bloom on the sea.”

Light and dark dominate. Women are remembered in flashes of whiteness: “Your white throat in the dark, the silent flick” (Le Joueur d’Échecs) or “the white curve of her arm gone from the night” (A Vow) or “tall as a white mast of white pine” (Sentinel). The images, whether this was intended or not, brush up against each other in one’s mind. At the same time, there is a darkness that shuts down several poems: “the dark sea at their back like the police” (A Calling) or “where they sink and sail into the dark like cinders” (Nostalgia) or: “And suddenly it went completely dark.” (The Fable of the Open Book). Paterson makes one reflect on how poets give custody to light and darkness: a handover with which no reader can quarrel.

Elsewhere, it is intriguing to notice how bleached of colour Paterson’s writing is. He is not one for fuss, fancy or folderol – very Scottish in that way (a Dundee man). Even the most spiritual of the poems (Lacrima, Funeral Prayer, Souls) are unornamented as plainsong. And there is a pull towards dark subject matter. Three suicides: Norwegian jazz singer Radka Toneff, American photographer Francesca Woodman and a nameless poet (in For a Drowned Poet). There is also the most moving, unsentimental poem, Mercies, about his dog’s last moment on the vet’s table. “And love was surely what her eyes conceded/ as her stare grew hard, and one bright aerial/ quit making its report back to the centre.” Scrutiny is Paterson’s forte: nothing escapes his gaze (though his splendidly unstable poem A Pocket Horizon – another poem involving an uncertain shore – would have it otherwise).

He has formidable skill as a conventional sonneteer but also takes assured liberties. One of my favourites is An Incarnation, a priceless, perfectly pitched dramatisation of the gap between the idiot jargon of a telephone market researcher and the doddery compliance of an old Scot trying to oblige:

I guess White British? None No I agree
Agree Agree I strongly disagree
You what me? Hold? For how long? Seriously?

I tried to act it out; sadly, my Scots accent was not up to the job. But this is poetry of the absurd, Paterson’s humour a boon. Séance is another playful poem formed of automatic writing; A Powercut, about being stuck in a lift, is a sonnet of zestful despair:

This is what we’ve come to, this damn lift,
this blackout, this airlock, this voiceless stop,
this empty set, this storm cave, this dead drop,
this deaf nut, this dumb waiter, this blind drift.

The poem skims its 14 floors, the lift stays put. But in this varied, painstaking, admirable collection there is no sign of a power cut anywhere.

Wave

For months I’d moved across the open water
like a wheel under its skin, a frictionless
and by then almost wholly abstract matter
with nothing in my head beyond the bliss
of my own breaking, how the long foreshore
would hear my full confession, and I’d drain
into the shale till I was filtered pure.
There was no way to tell on that bare plain
but I felt my power run down with the miles
and by the time I saw the scattered sails,
the painted front and children on the pier
I was nothing but a fold in her blue gown
and knew I was already in the clear.
I hit the beach and swept away the town.

40 Sonnets is published by Faber (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99