New Selected Poems: Douglas Dunn

by Douglas Dunn

In a distinguished poetic career, Douglas Dunn has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year. This selection draws on the entire range of Dunn's poetry, From "Terry Street" (1969) to "The Year's Afternoon" (2000).

Genres: Poetry

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

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

[Eric Steere · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dunn's poetry collected here demonstrates a mastery and great talent in expression through a range of styles of verse. His 1986 book Elegies remains for me one of the most evocative collections of poetry in the English language last century. It is a highly personal account of the loss of his first wife through cancer. The poems from Elegies can seem voyeuristic in their unguarded intimacy. His tone remains conversational and appealing to read in even more formal structures. The poems included in this selection are well chosen in appreciation of Dunn's effortless shifts through free verse to sonnet. Elegies marks for me a division in his career. The curiosity and ambitions of his earlier work from Terry Street to Elegies is stronger than his later work, which can be alternatively and distaste fully nationalistic, political, and trivial humor, even though Dunn's mastery of craft is still strong and confident. Dunn's earlier work is exceptional in its representation and interaction of the every man, the every Scot, the working classes that never sink to "bourgeois voyeurism or sympathetic mythification" as Eagleton maintains valid and high seriousness can be achieved. Dunn's dark humor is present throughout, but in his post Elegies work is novel in a spurious fashion. His nationalism reads abrasive,y in his later work and detracts from his further development. Dunn's poetry lacks great imagination of his contemporaries, but I wouldn't have him any other way. My bookshelf needs this poet for all qualities and character.