Search Results

“... Throughout this book, the poet Douglas Dunn provides epigraphs and quotations. His final contribution occurs in the last section, ‘Epilogue: The Last Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom Nairn did and felt on the unforgettable rainy Thursday of 6 May 1999. It was the first polling day for the reconvened Scottish Parliament ...”

“... Fergusson’ want to discuss Fergusson’s ‘Elegy, on the Death of Scots Music’. Douglas Dunn tells us that ‘spirited elegy, of a kind that trades more on celebration than mourning, is characteristic of the male Scottish mind.’ It takes a while to recover from the massiveness of that statement, and its inappropriateness ...”

“... poem, patient in a way that Updike is not always, and calm enough to eschew Updikean statement. Douglas Dunn’s new book of poems has none of Updike’s virtues but extends several of his vices. It will be a great disappointment to those readers who have admired Dunn’s earlier verse (like the book of Elegies for ...”

“... Instead, we have the admirable poems of Michael Longley, Tony Harrison, and particularly Douglas Dunn, whose Terry Street poems are models of their kind. Equally successful – permanent anthology figures – are Tony Harrison’s Uncle Joe, the stammering printer in ‘Self-Justification’, who supplied the poet with scribble-pads ...”

“... metaphors, on the other hand, can conjure objects with such a surprising vividness that Douglas Dunn calls them ‘landmarks in the history of the human eye’. ‘Hard to remember,’ he observes in ‘Loch Sionascaig’, ‘how the water went / Shaking the light, / Until it shook like peas in a riddling plate’. Or how a trout hung high its ...”

“... latest pamphlet in Chatto’s excellent ‘CounterBlasts’ series.* Written by the Scottish poet, Douglas Dunn, it chronicles the way in which Mrs Thatcher first conceived the idea of creating an alternative to the rates which would jolt local electors into blaming their councillors for high council spending. That way, she reasoned, they would flock to ...”

“... in lines like ‘the muddy Venus of the Firth/lunges through the waterburn’ may owe something to Douglas Dunn (a lingering presence), but which then takes a violent turn characteristic of a good deal of the volume. The protagonist’s diary is filled with the absences of other men: John’s overtime, Jack’s training-course, returning in the tiny ...”

“... full title is ‘St Kilda’s Parliament: 1879-1979. The photographer revisits his picture’, and Dunn’s Poetry Book Society note tells us that he’s never been there and first saw the photograph in Theodora Fitzgibbon’s A Taste of Scotland – evidently a regional cook-book with touristic overtones. But the whimsy about not believing in the mainland is ...”

“... as of a preoccupied man suppressing manic laughter, makes an occasional and intriguing appearance. Douglas Dunn once remarked to me that it was a pity there was no serious avant-garde in English poetry. Perhaps we had neither of us looked hard enough for it. In any case, the fact remains that there is, if one is prepared to take the trouble to seek it ...”

“... year he wears a fur coat to keep the sun out. In 1964, having polled 127 votes against Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s 16,659, MacDiarmid takes Douglas-Home (then Prime Minister) to court, denouncing him as ‘a zombie’. Thirty-six years earlier, flown to Dublin by the Irish Government, MacDiarmid finds himself in the early ...”

“... judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter ...”

“... Horace and Cicero. Allan Massie is a Scotsman, applauded for his Scottishness by Alan Bold and Douglas Dunn, and he has adopted one of Scott’s devices for excusing the excesses of his imagination. Sir Walter would insert into his historical romances the pedantic objections of some imaginary fool, called Dryasdust or Cleishbottom: after struggling ...”

“... preservation, authenticity and vogueishness – have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy leasehold, poetry’), in others a rule-book ...”

“... Blair tried to inscribe a marked Scottish presence. But works such as the Ossianic poems, Home’s Douglas, Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd and Wilkie’s Epigoniad dropped away, and the emphasis that remained was almost exclusively on English (with Classical) texts and standards. Scottish literature, like all writing done outside England, was seen as an ...”

“... books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian ...”