In a BBC podcast on 18 September 2009, Don Paterson said of his poetical corpus that it was ‘One big book that you publish in instalments’. With each instalment, however, Paterson's poetic voice and his thematic concerns have matured. For example, over the course of his twenty-year career, from Nil Nil to Rain, Paterson's poetry has continually addressed issues of belief, from his own early loss of faith, to his increasing interest in Buddhism and his more recent fascination with antihumanist works such as John Gray's Straw Dogs. This chapter will therefore address Paterson's engagement with religion, spirituality and the transcendent and demonstrate that these are essential concerns in his work.

If Paterson's oeuvre is indeed one big book, then his first collection, Nil Nil (1993), is the initial chapter of that book. On first impression Paterson may not appear overly concerned with spiritual matters. As Vicki Bertram noted at the time of the volume's publication:

The term ‘blokeish’ often seems quite accurate in relation to Paterson's early work. When asked how he came to be a poet, he once described an epiphany he had at the age of twenty-one: ‘[…] one night I was sitting watching TV in a rather revolting bedsit and I saw a programme which had Tony Harrison reading in a Leeds pub. It was amazing. Here were all these heavies in biker jackets greeting him over their pints.’ Yet, as we will see, amongst the many poems about ‘drink, books, sleep, sex, trains, death [and] sport’, Paterson also finds space to address a range of spiritual and philosophical topics.