Published by Arlen House, Galway, Ireland in February 2008.
In Perplexed Skin you’ll find a dog which has learnt to sing songs by Henry Purcell, a ghost which haunts the pissoir of a modern city centre pub, a man who waits until Judgement Day to take his own life; characters as various as these occupy brief narratives that weave in and out of sequences where Eros and elegy predominate.

Reviews

UNUSUAL IN ITS own way is Patrick Cotter's debut, Perplexed Skin. Its title sums up the book's concerns, which are chiefly with the romantic and sexual, but also with what it means to be comfortable - or not - in one's own skin. Cotter is well-known in literary circles as director of the Munster Literature Centre, as well as for his work with translation. All the more refreshing, then, to find a poet working within the "village" of contemporary poets but in a voice all his own; one which is unfashionable in the best sense.

Cotter clearly relishes language as much as he does sexuality: "Your mouth was a moist gourmet dessert" (Butterfly Girl); "A tigress is a girl who licks up/ all your purring like milk, before leaving you" (A Tigress Is . . .). He can be witty, too, as in The Singing Bichon, a nicely-judged study of dog-owning ambivalence informed by surrealism (this poodle performs arias - but only in private). Such highly-coloured imagery often resonates with European influence: the "bonsai-sized angel" on the book's first page could come straight from the Finn Ilpo Tiihonen, while Purchased Wisdom is dedicated to Haken Sandell, and one can see why from the opening lines: "Your body I strewed in cleft steaks,/ your rended head lay calmed before me". Internationalism breathes vigour into this work, and not only through the cast of girls - from Sweden, Japan, California, the Rhineland - its protagonist pursues.

-Fiona Sampson

The Irish Times May 2008

" Cotter is an intelligent writer, not only in the sense of having a poetic intelligence that enables him to manage his lines well, but in the sense of having a rational approach. He likes ideas, fools about with them, has a personal idiom and a sophisticated sensibility. ...... Cotter's vision of the world is not simple nor does he sing of it in rapturous tones. His mirroring of complexities shows just how mature and self-assured he is."

- Maurice Harmon,

Cork Literary Review September 2009

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