Author of three previous collections, a translation of Rilke's Orpheus, two books of aphorisms and recent winner of the Forward Prize (which, he tells us, his girlfriend made him spend on a carpet) Paterson introduced the first poem of his as-yet-untitled collection, ‘Two Trees', by saying "this might be the title poem... I don't know what it's about." The audience were then treated to an hour's worth of his fresh and musical poetry, delivered with great skill and understated power.

Paterson rarely tours, and this opportunity to hear him read his work was a remarkable one. He seemed apprehensive about unleashing the "grim stuff" - poems that he claims to have written "to get them out of the house". This is sometimes unnerving - as in the sequence of poems that "became an elegy" for his friend Michael Donaghy, a poet who died in 2004. The sequence ends with a haunting poem on Zurbaràn's St Francis in Meditation, which investigates the relationship between the saint and the abyss - "I'd say that the skull is working on him."

Paterson's humility forms a large part of both his reading style and his poetry. The second poem he read was described as an "apology to the silence", a theme which he says is common in his work. Paterson's poetry is tentative and observational - Frieda Hughes has named him "the benevolent stalker" - with a non-invasive viewpoint. His poem on St Francis uses this lack of arrogance to great effect, with the eerie repetition "I'd say that" giving, as Paterson believes the painting does, a strange power to uncertainty.

Elsewhere, our relationship to the abyss is explored in a poem inspired jointly by a friend's wedding and by Battleship Galactica, "one of the great things in Western culture", which explores the distance between us, "like specks of gold in the sea". In other poems, the loveable solidity of his children, trees, a Georgian artist's "VST plug-ins", and "all the earth and sky for breath and space to breathe in" shine through natural syntax and a flexible, beautiful rhyme. In a Q&A session after the reading, he discussed the difficulty in incorporating these last two elements, the rigidity of modern English syntax necessitating the half-rhyme common in modern verse.

The release of Paterson's new collection looks set to be something unmissable; get to the bookshops come September and curl up with these poems.

By Colette Sensier