Don Paterson opens the door of his airy Edinburgh flat, stretching out a leg to hold back his miniature poodle. While he makes tea and coffee, she retreats to her basket, then follows us into the living room where she curls, cat-like, on a cushion for the duration of our conversation. The household’s other dog, a black miniature poodle, is not on the premises. Being a puppy she is, Paterson says, at the frolicsome stage. “You could call her a scamp, but I use other words.”

The morning we meet, Paterson’s partner, New Yorker and novelist Nora Chassler, is away on holiday. “She’s fierce,” he says, proudly. Their high-ceilinged flat is filled with books, rugs, paintings and guitars. We sit at a window table, overlooking Bruntsfield Links, and Paterson reclines in a red plush armchair, offering a pet insurance booklet on which to put my mug. There is nothing particularly poetic about his appearance. His demeanour is grave, his dress plain, but when he speaks, in his gravelly Dundee accent, you hear the voice that fills his books: thoughtful, flinty, romantic and thrawn.

Twice winner of the T S Eliot Prize and recipient of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, not to mention an OBE he accepted, he says, for his mother, he has more prizes to his name than syllables in a haiku. One of Britain’s most accomplished poets, his forthcoming collection, 40 Sonnets, has been eagerly anticipated, following the acclaim of his last work, Rain, and those before it, such as Nil Nil and Landing Light.

With no discernible theme, other than universal subjects – love, children, nature, war, death and the meaning of life – 40 Sonnets is a richly emotional, often plangent and highly assured piece of work, and brought this reader close to tears on more than one occasion. Paterson looks gratified. “As I’ve grown older I only want to write about what I’m moved by or struck by,” he says. “And readers come to poetry for its emotional impact, for solace, or to be moved. I do in a straightforward sense think that’s what poetry’s for. It’s where the intelligence and the emotions converge in a form of words.”

Writing sonnets places him in the daunting company of Shakespeare, the best-loved of its exponents. He nods. “Unfortunately yes, it’s true. When people think that, it comes with a set of expectations. Like, for example, that you’d write a sequence. Well, this book isn’t a sequence at all. It reflects my obsessions over the last six years or so. Also, people think that sonnet is synonymous with the love poem, partly because of Shakespeare, the Elizabethans. That’s not true – it hasn’t been for a long time. In fact it wasn’t true of Shakespeare...”

Even so, love fills this collection, for Russell and Jamie, his twin sons from his first marriage, his partner, and a dog who had to be put down. But there’s also anger, as in his denunciation of Tony Blair in The Big Listener, or in A Scholar, where he appears to settle an old score with Professor Alastair Fowler, formerly of the University of Edinburgh, who criticised his book, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in the TLS: “The page succumbs to the atrocious care/that disinters the things not wholly there/by which your solemn field is justified”.

Recalling that spat, Paterson looks out of the window. “That whole thing was salutary.” The scholars he works with at the University of St Andrews, where he teaches poetry, include fellow poets Robert Crawford and John Burnside. They and other “beloved colleagues” had not prepared him for such ferocious combat. “I didn’t understand the dangers of encroaching onto somebody else’s territory.... though I was primarily upset because he misrepresented what I said. And also the proprietorial tone: this was his area and one should not dare to set foot into it without the kind of qualifications he values. Which strikes me as utterly ludicrous and prevents folk from reading these books for what they are – which is poetry still capable of meaning something to us, and moving us... But it’s not about Alastair Fowler, it genuinely isn’t, it’s just about that kind of scholarship.”

As for the sonnet form, which is so often described as formal, for him it poses no restrictions at all. “I’m not a 'lover of the sonnet form', it’s just that for me it’s the most invisible form, the one I think about least. ... It’s a way of dragging certain kinds of thought, expression, speech out of my own head, it’s not a way of constraining these thoughts, it’s the opposite.”

Despite his literary status Paterson is, in a sense, self-taught. The 51-year-old Dundonian’s conversation is peppered with musical analogies, because for many years he made a living as a jazz musician. It was a talent inherited from his father, who still lives in Dundee, with his mother. A process artist at D C Thomson’s by day, he was a musician after hours, and filled the house with guitars and thrillers: “He was a semi-pro, he played almost every night of the week – country and bluegrass, that’s his passion. He’s very pernickety in his taste. He still plays and still goes out and does the folk club on Monday night.

“From the age of 14, I used to go out and play with him. Then I left school really just to concentrate on music, that’s what I did for a long time. When I was 20 I moved down to London, to work as a musician. I did that and taught music and worked as a jazz musician for 10 years, till the age of 30, and at that time the literature began to take over, and the balance has shifted steadily since that time.”

It has tilted so far the other way, in fact, that he is itching to get back to performing. Examining his left hand, which has finally recovered from injury, he is, he says, about to come out of “semi-retirement”. He cannot wait. Meanwhile his sons, who are also musical, are in a band known as Stuffed Animals.

When, in his twenties, Paterson began to write poetry, it took him by surprise. He told one interviewer that, “When I started, I did have the sense of a wee machine that was wound up and ready to go.” Reminded of this, he says, “Yeah, it was really weird... It was kind of odd. It wasn’t even something I wanted to do.”

Surely it was particularly unexpected, given Dundee’s dreadful reputation for poetry, thanks to William McGonagall?

“I had to leave Dundee before I discovered I was going to write poetry. If I’d stayed there after the age of 20 I don’t think I would have done it... Maybe it’s something about the Dundee thing of not wanting to put your head above the parapet, the whole ‘kent your faither’ culture. And in many ways, because poetry is the most presumptuous thing you can do” – he laughs deeply – “to write poetry is almost to say, ‘I have something important to say, everybody shut up and listen!’ As a Dundonian that’s literally the last thing you’re going to do. So I had to be somewhere else to pump myself full of the artificial self-confidence required to break the silence. When I go to Dundee, I still just want to crawl into a drain. I actually love Dundee, I really do.”

Judging by the poem in 40 Sonnets called To Dundee City Council, his affection is tempered by annoyance, in this case by a detour for pedestrians on their way to the library: “thus adding twenty minutes to my trip/via ringroad, bombsite, rape tunnel and skip...” Has he had any response from the council? He looks mischievous. “I’m sure they haven’t read it. I think I’m pretty safe. For now.”

The ire in that poem is amplified in a handful of others, notably against war and its mongers, as in Absinthion: “What did I do in the war?/Son, I watched a download bar/and drank the last thing in the house.” Given how much is wrong with the world, does he have to ration his anger?

“I’m not sure an angry political poem is the best way to communicate my rage. I think it’s such a strong flavour it tends to overwhelm any other kind of emotional nuance. That’s not to say for a moment you can’t have an effective angry political poem, but others do it better than me. I tend to lose perspective and just rave.”

I mention Seamus Heaney’s political poems, especially those concerned with The Troubles, which approach the subject from left-field rather than full-on. At his name, Paterson brightens. “There are things that poetry or poetic speech can do in terms of ambiguity and nuance that you can’t do in any other way, and Seamus really knew that. He was able to bring that to the subject. He knew that the last thing that poetry was for was to simplify. Poetry is for problematising a subject, and looking at it from more than one perspective.

“Thinking of a poem like Punishment, the one where he talks about the tarring and feathering of the woman who went with British soldiers (it’s one of the ‘bog bodies' poems). It’s extremely political, but he’s making an attempt to understand the nature of these motivations for revenge in a broader historical and cultural context – and also not sparing himself at all. I think Seamus’s response to those things is exemplary, absolutely exemplary. He was possessed of remarkably fine judgement and discrimination in his choice of words, more than any other poet in our time, because he understood those words better than anyone.”

It seems gratuitous to ask if he is an influence, but Paterson shakes his head ruefully.

“He’s almost impossible to be influenced by. Because what he does you can’t really impersonate. He’s very various in his themes, impossibly rich in his range of allusions, and had mastered that thing of 'optional depth', when you can read the things as just a wonderful song or a story, but actually when you start to chase up some of those allusions or his punning use of etymology, it's like a three-dimensional chess game. It’s an incredibly subtle piece of composition that functions on many levels. It’s absolutely amazing.

“For a poet, he is just a call to get better. That’s what he represents. Just raise your game, son. You want to do this, then you’ve got to be better, you’ve got to be smarter, you’ve got to be more musical, you’ve got to understand where all these words come from and the shadows they throw – and you have to let none of that show, let none of that show. Wear whatever learning you have as lightly as you possibly can, and make a song of the damn thing first.”

No pressure, then.

40 Sonnets by Don Paterson is published by Faber & Faber, £14.99