Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1985, these poems were written after the death of Douglas Dunn's first wife in March 1981.
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About the Author
Douglas Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, in 1942 and lived there until he married at the age of twenty-two. After working as a librarian in Scotland and Akron, Ohio, he studied English at Hull University, graduating in 1969. He then worked for eighteen months in the university library after which, in 1971, he became a freelance writer. In 1991 he was appointed Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews.
As well as ten collections of poetry, including Elegies (1985), The Year's Afternoon and The Donkey's Ears (both 2000), Douglas Dunn has written several radio and television plays, including 'Ploughman's Share' and 'Scotsman by Moonlight'. He has also edited The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2000).
Douglas Dunn has won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and has twice been awarded prizes by the Scottish Arts Council. In 1981 he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for St Kilda's Parliament. In January 1986 he was overall winner of the 1985 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his collection Elegies.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Moving poems of mourning,
This review is from: ELEGIES. (Hardcover)
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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Moving poems of mourning,
This review is from: Elegies (Paperback)
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.
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