Don Paterson's early poem ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ wears its acted out aggression on its sleeve. It centres on the attempt by the speaker's father to buy a hi-fi needle for a lo-fi player – resulting in a shopkeeper treating the poorly informed dad with amused contempt: ‘We had the guy in stitches: “You can't … / er … you'll have to upgrade your equipment.” ‘ The poem imagines and ventriloquises ‘Fidelities’, an elegiac fragment on the theme of filial piety, one as if written by the poet son of this gramophone snob: ‘I gently lower the sharp nib to the line / and wait for it to pick up the vibration’. Switching back to its roman-font narration style, it comes to a close in what is offered as a more authentically registered fidelity of sound and impact:

‘An Elliptical Stylus’ catches the moment when the other lights in which a beloved father may be viewed make themselves felt. If its italicised section evokes only to dismiss in parody the sensitively adjectival plain style of an upwardly mobile Movement-period poetic (Thom Gunn's ‘High Fidelity’, for instance), its flawed paternal solidarity aligns it with the swear-word-flavoured mode of Tony Harrison's work. Indeed, Paterson's ruling out cauterising ‘this fable / with something axiomatic on the nature / of articulacy and inheritance’ is a pointed divergence from the Harrison school of eloquence. What renders its close so impactful and painful is the response being dramatised as an imagined lashing out at the nearest and only other interested party: its reader.

Yet, the poet being its first reader, may the final line of ‘An Elliptical Stylus’ be understood as also self-referential? Paterson resists such slippage of pronominal reference with firmly marked positions at the start of the first and second stanzas: ‘My uncle’ and ‘My Dad’.