Elegies

by Douglas Dunn

Poems explore the author's relationship with his wife and portray his grief after her death

Genres: Poetry, Grief

Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Douglas Eaglesham Dunn is a Scottish poet, academic and critic.

He was a Professor of English at the University of St Andrews from 1991, becoming Director of the University's Scottish Studies Centre in 1993 until his retirement in September 2008. He is now an Honorary Professor at St Andrews, still undertaking postgraduate supervision in the School of English. He was a member of the Scottish Arts Council (1992–1994). He holds an honorary doctorate (LL.D., law) from the University of Dundee, an honorary doctorate (D.Litt., literature) from the University of Hull and St Andrews. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. Terry Street, Dunn's first collection of poems, appeared in 1969 and received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award as well as a Somerset Maugham Award.

Reviews

[Lyndsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite possibly my favourite poetry book of all time. Douglas writes with such passion and emotion about his wife. I cried reading these poems and am touched by his words. Beautiful!

[Jip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik heb me kostelijk vermaakt met het lezen van deze gedichten in een Schots accent (anders werkt de rijm niet), maar dat was dan ook wel het enige waarover viel te lachen.

Best friend and love, my true contemporary,
She taught me how to live, then how to die,
And I curate her dreams and gallery.
Writing with light, the heart within my eye
Shines on my grief, my true contemporary.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

A highly accomplished work and ! an Incredibly painful read. One for tears

Published in the 80s which is often referred to as a 'poetic drought' in British poetry as a good deal of the modernist crowd went ahead and died (oddly I find this 'drought' to refer primarily to English poets as Scottish poets were productive and effective as ever, minus the death of Sydney G). These are elegies for his wife lost to cancer at 37 and it's, hitting like that. They're not poems desperate to shatter every formal barrier but they are earnest and I'll find some more Douglas soon because this was subtle but honest with brilliance.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

All about his wife. So sad, very lovely.

[Eric Steere · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most emotive book of poetry I have ever read.

[JMJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw, beautiful and brutal all in one. A very candid tour of the anatomy of grief done in a haunting, lyrical style.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Douglas Dunn’s love for his wife is undeniable—it permeates every word, every verse. His deep admiration for her shines through in the smallest details, from the way she spoke to strangers to her dreams of distant travels.

[Jonah Corren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastating, beautiful, deeply human. These poems sway between ones you can digest and feel in an instant and others which take time and patience to comprehend. Time hasn't dampened Dunn's honest account of grief and the vignettes of a life left with a yawning gap at its centre. You feel, and not only that: you understand.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

ELEGIES is a collection of poems which Douglas Dunn wrote after the death of his wife, the photographer Lesley Balfour Dunn, from cancer in 1981 at the age of only 37. The poems cover a number of issues related to the loss, from memories of former married life to the dry legalities of funeral arrangements and the difficulties of staying in the same house after the death.

The poems are written in a variety of traditional forms and metres--no modernist free verse here. I find the sonnets to be especially moving. Nonetheless, Dunn's language wasn't especially memorable to this reader, and I'd be hard-pressed to directly quote from the collection without looking at my copy. Rather, what one takes away from ELEGIES is its imagery and themes, and these are often quite haunting. In "Listening", the grieving man alone among the joyous crowd writes, "When laughter from a firelit barbecue / Travelled with woodsmoke across the gardens, / I saw an apple hold its skin against an apple -- / Two blushing faces kissing in the dark." In "The Stories", one of the longest poems in the collection, Dunn mockingly longs for a colonial outpost where he can exile himself, like aristocratic widowers in the old British Empire.

The collection isn't entirely flawless. I was especially unhappy with the clunky couplet "It was September blue / When I walked with you first, my love" in the poem "Anniversaries". Nonetheless, these are mainly very successful poems. I only read the collection because it caught my eye on the shelves of my university library, but I'm intrigued enough to explore Dunn's work further.

[Roger Pettit · Rating 5 out of 5]

First published in 1985, Elegies is a collection of 39 poems by Scottish poet Douglas Dunn. The poems express Dunn's love for, and grief at the premature death of, his wife Lesley, who died in 1981 and to whom the book is dedicated. It might seem to someone who has not read the collection but who knows something about its genesis that Elegies would be a somewhat depressing read. But that is simply not the case. Not surprisingly, some of the poems are melancholic, even sad. But the whole collection is uplifting and very, very moving. Some of the poems express in beautiful, but simple, language the nature of the poet's mourning. "Arrangements", which describes Dunn's visit with his father-in-law to the local town hall to register the details of his wife's death, is one such. Other poems celebrate the couple's happy courtship and partnership. "Dining", for example, recalls, amongst other things, the poet's visits to France with his wife and the enjoyment she derived from going to food markets there and from planning and cooking meals. All of the poems in this wonderful collection are thought-provoking. They are also immediately accessible to anyone who, like me, does not know anything about the technicalities of writing or reading poetry but who enjoys a poem that says something relevant to them in a simple and direct manner. Elegies is a superb book. 10/10.

[Smcalli1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of poems written by one of Scotland preeminent poets following the death of his wife. Knowing the context of this collection of poems made them all the more poignant. Often I find myself coming to the end of a poem and having to put the book down to compose myself and consider the pain of the author. Highly recommended.

[Samir Rawas Sarayji · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought a collection of elegies would be too much, but Dunn's grief as well as his beautiful memories of his wife really touched me. And although at times cerebral, because of the consistency in poetic techniques, the emotions and imagery never lacked.

[Shaina Steinberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book chronicling the end of Dunn's wife sickness and the mourning that comes after she dies. It's beautiful and compact. Somehow his grief is both understandable and vibrant.

[Peter B Waddell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a special book. Nothing cloying, nothing sentimental. Elegant lines record the exploration of memories, loss, love, reconfiguration.

[Rico Caraco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, immediate and unforgettable.

[Eilidh Fyfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

love love love love

[Bohemian Book Lover · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Emotionally-charged poems of grief &
*Loss,
*Exposing a widowed poet's experience of
*Grappling with the aftermath of his wife's death.
*I found them to be raw & honest, seeing the cathartic
*Effect they must've had on him. These aren't merely outpourings of a widower's tragic
*Sadness, but beautifully crafted memorials in verse, recalling the life of a beloved wife & a loving marriage that was cut short by her terminal illness.

[scarlettraces · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry gets better as the grief gets less acute. (I am theorising, of course, I have no idea of the actual order in which they were written. But I do find the more concrete, immediate just-before-and-after poems less attuned to the possibility of image and language than the look-backwards poems.)

[Graham Sillars · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my kind of poetry! There were a couple that I enjoyed but mostly they kind of went over my head.

[Russio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dunn has written a series of poems about the death of his wife, at a young age, from cancer it seems. He shows you various aspects of his grief in these poems (well he would - they are elegies after all). There are some profound truths here, not the least that the happy lives we can find ourself inhabiting are appallingly temporary. A perfect accompaniment for a young man suffering from depression in another bleak January, which I am sure was not exactly the target audience but there we are. I sympathise with Mr Dunn as he was then and hope his life has been happier since - hopefully writing helped him out.

[Jonathan Gayther · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this collection just after my wife's death in 2017 and one poem - The Kaleidoscope - stood out. When I read it now it still has the power to take me back to the rawness and immediacy of absolute loss that I felt in those early days, and the shock and confusion that accompany it.