Poetry: In his early poem, 'A Dream of Judgement', Douglas Dunn has a vision of Samuel Johnson sitting on a throne "saying No,/Definitely no" to all the books held up to him, while a small Scotsman "Who looks like Boswell, but is really me" licks his boots.
At the time he wrote these lines, Dunn was metaphorically sitting at the feet of that other blimpish Englishman, Philip Larkin: his debut volume, Terry Street, appeared while Dunn was a mature student at the University of Hull, in 1969. With its hard-drinking trawlermen and put-upon housewives, Terry Street mixes poignancy and grit in just the right proportions. Dunn finds the perfect image for the poet in search of urban pastoral when he writes of a man pushing a lawnmower down the street: "That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass".
The one thing that Dunn's Hull is not is obviously discontented with itself. The poet is detached rather than savagely indignant. With the Scottish subjects of Barbarians (1979), however, a new anger entered his work. The ferocity of his assaults on "couplets dipped/In sherry" and other bourgeois monstrosities from south of the border is good old-fashioned class warfare but serves a deeper, unspoken need: I really am a Scottish poet, he is telling us, and not the co-opted Englishman you may have mistaken me for. A quatrain such as 'Glasgow Schoolboys, Running Backwards' exemplifies his new style:
High wind . . . They turn their backs to it,
and push.
Their crazy strides are chopped in little
steps.
And all their lives, like that, they'll have
to rush
Forwards in reverse, always holding
their caps.
As Michael Longley has reminded us, the ancient Greeks visualised the future as lying behind us, and Dunn's experiments in walking backwards are really disguised attempts to break free of the alienated state of Thatcher's Britain. They continue in St Kilda's Parliament, whose title poem explores the encounter between a photographer and the remotest of all the Hebridean islanders, whose isolation and poverty defeat all metropolitan fantasies of Gaelic otherness. Belying the English friend of 'Here and There', who sees his return to Scotland as a retreat into provincialism, Dunn flaunts his Europeanness in the long poem 'Europa's Lover', reprinted here in its entirety.
Like many a poet compiling a 'Selected', Dunn slants his choice heavily in favour of recent work, especially Northlight and Dante's Drum-Kit. One noticeable difference from the earliest books is Dunn's increasing at-homeness in the longer poem. He is especially fond of offbeat fantasias, eulogising subjects as diverse as libraries, paper clips and the inventor of the saxophone. If nothing else, they provided him with much-needed relief after the harrowing Elegies of 1985, written on the death of his first wife and still easily his best-known book.
Dunn's later work includes The Donkey's Ears, an ambitious long poem on the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, and The Year's Afternoon, in which solitude and late middle-age push him towards a new reckoning with Larkin's influence. The best word for the kind of poems he is writing these days is Horatian: civilised, humane and affectionate rather than scarifying, raucous or otherwise ill-behaved. The barbarian has settled down. The last poem here, 'Martagon Lilies', ends with an artistic credo culminating in "being kind, in the holding of hands".
It is the long and winding journey to this vision of goodwill rather than its conclusion that makes Dunn the compelling poet he is, but faced with this New Selected Poems even Dr Johnson might have managed a "Yes, definitely yes".
David Wheatley is a poet and academic
New Selected Poems 1964-2000. By Douglas Dunn, Faber and Faber, 340 pp. £20