There are not many things, it seems, that really wind Don Paterson up. When he does get on a roll, you need to brace yourself - but for the most part he doesn't throw his ideas at you.

Instead, he holds them up to the light, hesitantly, rummaging through his thoughts for the right way of phrasing something, often dissatisfied.

He's a poet, after all, and one who reckons not to complete a poem in under a year, with half a dozen on the go at any one time. ''There's no hurry. There's no-one waiting for the next sonnet. It's not Ian Rankin. (I love Ian Rankin by the way.)''

Detesting arrogance in others, he's nervous of being accused of this himself, knowing that he has come across that way in the past - ''when I was younger and more insecure''. To be honest, though, he can still be a little forbidding.

Maybe it's just that Dundee ''hard man'' image. His comments about growing up there are pithy and vicious. But it's also something to do with the way he presents his work. Watching him read recently from his latest collection, Landing Light, it was as if he was throwing a gauntlet down to his audience. These are my poems - take them or leave them. He wasn't there to be liked.

''I do the best I can possibly do and I can't make it any better. And it doesn't mean I have a high opinion. It's just that it's as good as it's going to get. And I know what I'm doing and'' (he hesitates) ''this is going to sound arrogant again and I don't mean it like that at all, but I don't care what anybody thinks. I wouldn't like people to walk out - I'd like them to be changed in some small way. But I'm not worried about the critics.''

Then he sniggers, like a schoolboy who thinks he's just said something rude.

About his music making - he's a skilled jazz composer and performer - he reveals far more vulnerability. ''I'd like to spend the next 40 years, if God spares me, just being a better musician. Because I'm okay but I'm not great. I'm more excited about that . . . ''

He pulls himself up short, knowing he's about to make a reckless comparison with his poetry. The truth is, he loves them both, but with Landing Light only recently completed he feels he's got little else to say - ''and if I say it, it will be in other forms''.

Looking round at the clutter of guitars and keyboards in his Kirriemuir home, it doesn't seem surprising that musical images crop up a lot in his poems. Guitars and sound boxes of different types feature along with birds and angels, twins and especially labyrinths, which are, he ventures, where he is happiest. They are also closely related to Hell.

''It's the most interesting place for a poet. I suspect that most of us think of ourselves inhabiting a lower planet and that's the reason why so many stories come from that. Writing about celebration is so much harder to do.''

Perhaps that is why he is surprised to find himself now writing such passionately celebratory poems about his youngest children, as in the sonnet Waking with Russell: ''How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men! / I kissed your mouth and pledged myself for ever.''

There are poems in Landing Lights which Paterson admits, had he heard them being read a few years back, would have sent him running from the room to stick his head down the nearest toilet.

But having twins, and turning 40 - it does something to a man. Even then he throws in a bit of Dante's Inferno just in case you think that Dundonian tough image is going soft.

His range is wide, from the luminous imagery of The Landing (Paterson refers to it as his ''manifesto'' and indeed it sheds light back on many of the preceding poems in Landing Lights) to the depressingly recognisable account of a football team's spiralling decline

in the much earlier Nil Nil (''the scores so obscene/no respectable journal will print them''). So he feels no need to apologise if some of his references are less immediate.

''If I make an allusion I make it un-self-consciously, because it's something I believe intuitively to be in the common store - and it's something that people should know if they

didn't know it. And there's also that thing about if you say something people might go and check it out, which is important as well.

''I tell you what would be a problem is to make a self-conscious decision to remove those things that you felt belonged there.''

For if arrogance is the sin Paterson fears most, self-

consciousness runs it a close second.

''Then you'd be starting to second guess the reader, which is a huge mistake and a slippery slope. And really you know writers have done enough in the way of self-interrogation.

''It's time the reader showed a wee bit of initiative - the relationship between poet and reader is not one way. We've got to meet in the middle, you know?''

Attempts in recent British poetry to be less elitist are laudable, he says, but he feels we've swung too far the other way.

''I'd rather write something that was shite and be accused of being overblown than write wee descriptions of things. It doesn't do you any good.

''Being entertaining is first base, but a poem has to have more than that. You don't see any of this stuff in continental literature at all - that reticence about 'This is what I think about something'.

''But we're paralysed, especially in this century. Partly it's to do with the fact that there has been a far too close identification between the author and the book.

''And of course because of the way we identify the two - and read the work, even of contemporary writers, continually through the lives they led - people are going to say: Who are you to say that? Who are you to stand up in public? You are a nobody!

''And of course you're nobody. And of course you can't honour these things that you're talking about half the time. That's not the point. You are saying: This is something to which I believe we should aspire; these are things I think are important to think about. People, unfortunately, in the UK see you as setting yourself up.''

He deplores the way Philip Larkin's poems became discredited in the light of his biography. ''It's bullshit! The poems were the better part of him. Just because he had a worst part didn't invalidate the other part.''

Biography, Paterson argues, has little to do with the poetic experience. All we share, the poet and the reader is the space between us: in his case, a dark labyrinth space, witnessing to precious shafts of light.

''No singer of the day or night / is lucky as I am / the dark my sounding board, the light / my auditorium.''

Landing Light by Don Paterson is published by Faber & Faber, priced (pounds) 12.99.