Don Paterson's author photograph, on his online Faber page, combines cool directness with an archly askance gaze. Looking into the camera's lens, the subject appears to fix his eye boldly, knowingly on the viewer, yet the pose is also angled sympathetically, and the facing eyebrow seems to be raised, as if he were not quite able to take the process seriously. It is a flattering, frank shot; an image that appears to grant a face-to-face between reader and poet, while ensuring that its composition inspires respect, through distance. Paterson's ruminative cameragazing is suggestive of ‘serious’ biography in the Oxford University Press tradition of poet-portraiture, but his casual attire, the natural backdrop, and the three-point lighting – which reduces the shadows and stark contrasts produced by direct illumination – soften the austerity of the shot, emphasising his accessibility. One sees a similar interplay between formality and over-familiarity on the dust jacket of Orpheus, where a classic writerly pose, hand studiously on chin, meets the cheeky full-frontal smile of the youthful poet: Paterson is at once the boy-next-door and the sophisticated man of letters. In each case, ‘Don Paterson’ shows up as a textual object, available to be interpreted, analysed, explicated and evaluated by current and future generations of readers.

Paterson's work has both self-consciously responded to and gleefully ironised such objectifications of the lyric subject. At the start of ‘A Talking Book’, his lines appear directly to speak to an ill-assorted audience of critics, potential purchasers, poetasters and young fans, as if all were gathered at a public reading in a commercial bookshop:

It is an address that showcases writerly susceptibility to, as well as agile manipulation of, good reader-relations.