Douglas Dunn most recent collection of poems is St Kilda’s Parliament.
Rotund and acrobatic tits explored Bud-studded branches on our tallest birch tree, A picture that came straight from her adored, Delightfully composed chinoiserie.
My girl was four weeks dead before that first Green haunting of the leaves to come, thickening The senses with old hopes, an uncoerced Surrender to the story of the Spring.
In summer, after dinner, we used to sit Together in our...
The Navy groaned through its traditions. Fats Domino sang ‘Blueberry Hill’; It came through a hatch from America. The mothballed minesweepers pretended to be A chorus line of the Western World, Young ladies fallen into disrepute.
This dusk is that dusk, its perfect duplicate, Down to the four swans, an evening mist That turns the conifers to Western Blue. They’ve closed the...
A pressed fly, like a skeleton of gauze, Has waited here between page 98 And 99, in the story called ‘Bliss’, Since the summer of ’62, its date,
Its last day in a trap of pages. Prose Fly, what can ‘Je ne parle pas français’ mean To you who died in Scotland, when I closed These two sweet pages you were crushed between?
Here is a green bus-ticket for one...
Literary travellers, getting off the train at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, must have wondered if there are other cities which can boast a main point of entry, an introductory landmark, named after a novel. Consider the possibilities: Bleak House would suit Liverpool Street; Illusions Perdues would serve for the Gare du Nord; Great Expectations would whet the appetites of Scottish tyros arriving at King’s Cross.
Among the more unusual relics of the fishing industry in Hull’s maritime museum is a holed fragment of the trawler Mino, sunk off the Dogger Bank in October 1904. At the time, the Russian...
Every handful of John Updike’s silver has its square coin, its bad penny, its fake. This exquisitely careful writer tends to relax into flamboyance: it is the verbal equivalent of...
In books that go on about how the English have imposed their language and their manners on other English-speaking nations (Australian, Canadian, Scottish and Welsh and Irish, others), what is...
D.J. Enright recently celebrated his 70th birthday. In commemoration, Oxford University Press have prepared a rather lean Selected Poems, and a volume of personal reminiscences and critical...
‘Where do you come from?’ asks one of the most important questions in contemporary poetry – where’s home? Answering the pulls and torsions of that question produces much...
Douglas Dunn’s Selected Poems includes the greater part of his published poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the...
Recently I received a somewhat smug letter from one of the editors of PN Review asking me to contribute to yet another symposium on the state of critical chassis which still persists in Great...
Some of the stories in Secret Villages were published in the New Yorker, some in Encounter and some in Punch. It is interesting to compare the three styles. Those for the Americans make Scotland...
The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament is about a local institution ‘quite unlike Westminster’, a gathering ‘by interested parties to discuss the day’s work and any...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.