Nil Nil, the title of Don Paterson's first full-length collection, which was published in 1993, offers a number of clues to the understanding of his oeuvre. Paterson's work has often investigated the various time-honoured games that can be played with numbering, scoring and duplicating, and frequently turns its attention to paradoxes that surround the use of quantifying terminology such as ‘nil’, ‘zero’ and ‘double’. Such games keep leading back to the question of whether there is any objective principle supporting our cherished ideas of coherence, meaning and value. In his work, we cannot find belief in a creator, or indeed any transcendent principle – although that is hardly an uncommon feature of contemporary poetry. Yet if Paterson does indeed assume meaning to be absent, it is worth noting that through his focus on games, scores and numbers, absence is emphasised, rather than, as so often, taken for granted or glibly noted. Secondly, we are repeatedly asked to contemplate the absence of meaning in human fact, large or small. One question this chapter poses is why Paterson would write poetry at all, since this too seems to amount to a mere game: the artist plays with the verbal apparatus of meaning, but fails to derive any. He floats the idea that he is unable to raise the lyric score above zero, and is locked into stalemate.

At other times, Paterson's work indicates that writing poetry is self-validating play in the face of the void. There are moments when the satisfaction to be gained from the technical mastery of art seems to outweigh the emptiness of meaning's absence. The title Nil Nil raises the question of whether poetry involves the stalemate of ‘nil’ meeting itself – a no-score draw – or whether the game is the thing that makes the contest worthwhile, so that there is a win in simply playing. The latter possibility is raised in a particularly forceful and pointed way by the long poem ‘The Alexandrian Library’, Part I of which appeared in Nil Nil, and of which two subsequent Parts appeared in the later books, God's Gift to Women (1997) and Landing Light (2003). A protracted and mysterious narrative confronts and incorporates much that is squalid, ludicrous or petty in a ‘sensitive, paranoid, derelict romance’, as Paterson puts it in Gift (47). This is a phrase that Alan Gillis, with reason, cites as identifying ‘Paterson's aesthetic more generally’.