Dunn, Douglas (Eaglesham) 1942-

views updated

DUNN, Douglas (Eaglesham) 1942-

PERSONAL: Born October 23, 1942, in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, Scotland; son of William Douglas (a factory worker) and Margaret (McGowan) Dunn; married Lesley Balfour Wallace (a senior keeper of an art gallery), November 26, 1964 (died, March 13, 1981); married Lesley Jane Bathgate (a graphic designer and artist), August 10, 1985; children: one son. Education:Attended University of Glasgow; Scottish School of Librarianship, A.L.A., 1962; University of Hull, B.A. (English; with first class honors), 1969.

ADDRESSES: Office—School of English, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland. Agent—Pat Kavanagh, A. D. Peters and Co. Ltd., 10 Buckingham St., London WC2N 6BU, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Renfrew County Library, Renfrewshire, Scotland, junior library assistant, 1959-62; University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, library assistant at Andersonian Library, 1962-64; Akron Public Library, Akron, OH, assistant librarian, 1964-66; University of Glasgow, librarian at Chemistry Department Library, 1966; University of Hull, Hull, England, assistant librarian at Brynmor Jones Library, 1969-71, writer-inresidence, 1974-75; University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland, professor of English language and literature, 1991—, and director of St. Andrews Scottish Studies Institute. Poet and freelance writer; writerin-residence at University of New England in Australia, 1984, and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee District Library, 1986-88; University of Dundee, writer-in-residence, 1981-82, honorary visiting professor, 1987-89. Member of Scottish Arts Council.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Scottish PEN, Society of Authors.

AWARDS, HONORS: Society of Authors Eric Gregory Award, 1968, for manuscript collection, and Somerset Maugham Award, 1972, for Terry Street; Scottish Arts Council publication awards, 1970, for Terry Street, and 1975, for Love or Nothing; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1976, for Love or Nothing; Hawthornden Prize, 1982, for St. Kilda's Parliament; Whitbread Literary Awards for poetry and for book of the year, 1985, both for Elegies; honorary LL.D., University of Dundee, 1987.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Terry Street, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1969, Chilmark House (Washington, DC), 1973.

Backwaters, The Review, 1971.

The Happier Life, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1972, Chilmark House (Washington, DC), 1973.

Love or Nothing, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1974.

Barbarians, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1979.

Europa's Lover, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1982.

St. Kilda's Parliament, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1982.

Elegies, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1985.

Selected Poems: 1964-1983, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1986.

Northlight, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1988.

New and Selected Poems, 1966 to 1988, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Dante's Drum-Kit, Faber & Faber (Boston, MA), 1993.

This Year's Afternoon, Faber & Faber (Boston, MA), 2000.

The Donkey's Ears: Politovsky's Letters Home, Faber & Faber (Boston, MA), 2000.

New Selected Poems, 1964-1999, Faber & Faber (London, England), 2003.

EDITOR

New Poems, 1972-73: The P.E.N. Anthology, Hutchinson (London, England), 1973.

A Choice of Lord Byron's Verse, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1974.

Two Decades of Irish Writing, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1975.

What Is to Be Given: Selected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, Carcanet Press (Manchester, England), 1976.

The Poetry of Scotland, Batsford, 1979.

Poetry Book Society Supplement, Poetry Book Society, 1979.

A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1982.

To Build a Bridge, Lincolnshire and Humberside Arts Association, 1982.

(And author of introduction) The Essential Browning, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1990.

The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, Faber & Faber (Boston, MA), 1992.

Scotland: An Anthology, Fontana (London, England), 1992.

The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.

RADIO AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS

Scotsmen by Moonlight (play), BBC-Radio, 1977.

(Author of verse commentary) Running, BBC-TV, 1977.

Ploughman's Share (play), BBC-TV, 1979.

Wedderburn's Slave, BBC-Radio Scotland, 1980.

(Author of verse commentary) Anon's People, BBC-TV Scotland, 1984.

The Telescope Garden, BBC-Radio, c. 1985.

OTHER

Secret Villages (short stories), Dodd, Mead (New York, NY), 1985.

Under the Influence: Douglas Dunn on Philip Larkin, Edinburgh University Press, 1987.

(Translator) Jean Racine, Andromache: A Version of Racine's "Andromaque," Faber & Faber (London, England), 1990.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends (short stories), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1995.

Contributor to periodicals, including New Statesman, Poetry Nation, Times Literary Supplement, New Yorker, Punch, London, New Review, and Listener. Poetry reviewer, Encounter, beginning 1971; special editor, Antaeus, Volume 12, 1973.

Dunn's manuscripts are collected at the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, Hull, England.

SIDELIGHTS: With the publication of Elegies in 1985, Scottish writer Douglas Dunn became "established as one of Britain's most important contemporary poets," according to Bernhard O'Donoghue of the Times Literary Supplement. A Stand contributor called Dunn "a poet of passionate decency who reminds us that decorum, decoration and decency have a common core," while Adam Thorpe wrote in the Observer, "Dunn's stated task as a poet is to risk feeling, to preserve the sweet and true, 'to be life's accomplice.'" Dunn has been praised for his form in both his poetry and short stories. A recurring theme in his writings is Scotland and its people.

In a review of Dante's Drum-Kit, James Wood suggested in the London Review of Books that the volume "will be a great disappointment to those readers who have admired Dunn's earlier verse [because] from somewhere, most traceably Larkin, Dunn has got the idea that poetry must be wise. Typically, he dispenses this wisdom with much colloquialism, in lines that are as loose as sacking: they seem almost to fall off the page." However, in the Times Literary Supplement, Don Paterson praised the poet's transition: "Dunn's ability to transform himself from one kind of poet to another from book to book is due, in part, to the small number of personal effects he has to check through the barrier each time; his style resides more in an effortlessly graceful syntax and a naturally rich vocabulary than the usual battery of tricks and tropes. . . . His technique alone is almost enough to prevent him from writing a bad poem." Paterson concluded, "Dante's Drum-Kit contains more than enough vintage Dunn to fill an average collection."

In his short-story collection Boyfriends and Girlfriends Dunn displays his knack for writing dialog and experimenting with the short-story form. The stories, mainly set in Scotland, feature mostly middle-aged, middle-class, lowbrow Scots undergoing transformations. Frances Partridge remarked in theSpectator that Dunn's "gift for dialogue at once catches the attention," adding that the writer's "plots are inventive . . . original, quiet and subtle rather than over dramatic," and "many . . . contain as much meat as a full-length novel." O'Donoghue wrote, "Dunn's general subject [is] the crudeness of power-politics with its hierarchies and condescensions," and his "stories, like his public poems, are severe in their strictures against any easy political judgments." Carter Kaplan explained in a review of Boyfriends and Girlfriends for World Literature Today: "Dispassion is clearly Dunn's goal . . . and the stark directness of his voice superbly reflects the bleak and wounded landscapes which occupy him." Noted Kaplan: "Dunn ignores literary and philosophical traditions." O'Donoghue concluded, "The collection is a riveting amalgam of opinion and humour and elegance, and there isn't a dull page in it."

For Scotland: An Anthology Dunn collected pieces about Scotland written by twentieth-century writers, including foreigners. Maurice Lindsay remarked in the Times Literary Supplement: "Retrospectively, it adds up to more of an argument than a celebration; but, with such an end in view, the prose and the poetry are cleverly counterpointed, and nearly everything included is aptly chosen. It is, however, a fairly grim Scotland that Dunn depicts; plenty of politics and passion, but not much humour." John Jolliffe asserted in the Spectator that "one of the great merits of this anthology is that it gives some idea of how and why [the Scots'] shortcomings have arisen, as well as illustrating the splendid qualities" they possess.

"That there is such a thing as Scottish poetry distinct from the body of English literature is the argument of Dunn's well-reasoned introduction" to The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, maintained Peter Meinke in the Spectator. The compilation includes representative writers in the Gaelic, Scots, and English languages whom Dunn thinks are distinctively Scottish. However, Dunn excludes samples of his own poetry. "Dunn surely does his anthology a disservice by his modest self-exclusion. Dunn . . . has moved from being the ambivalently detached poet of working-class English life to being one of the few in contemporary Scottish poetry . . . to re-invent and meditate on a significant number of Scottish historical occasions and animating motifs," commented Neil Corcoran in the Times Literary Supplement.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6, 1976, Volume 40, 1986.

Crawford, Robert, and David P. Kinloch, Reading Douglas Dunn, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1992.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 40: Poets of Great Britain and Ireland since 1960, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Haffenden, John, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1981.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, November 1, 1995, Ray Olson, review of The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, p. 454.

Library Review, June, 1994, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 63.

Listener, August 9, 1973.

London Review of Books, July 9, 1992, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 10; March 24, 1994, James Wood, review of Dante's Drum-Kit, p. 22; June 21, 2001, David Wheatley, "Dialect with Army and Navy," p. 40.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 28, 1985.

New Statesman, June 16, 1972; December 6, 1974.

New Statesman & Society, August 7, 1992, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 41; March 10, 1995, review of Boyfriends and Girlfriends, p. 36.

Observer (London, England), July 2, 1972; October 20, 1974; January 3, 1993, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 36; April 3, 1994, review of Dante's Drum-Kit, p. 18; January 22, 1995, review of Boyfriends and Girlfriends, p. 20; January 21, 1996, review of Boyfriends and Girlfriends, p. 16.

Oxford Poetry, Volume 2, number 2, 1985.

Parnassus, fall, 1993, Bill Marx, "Things to Translate and Other Poems," p. 100.

Spectator, July 22, 1972; January 4, 1975; August 10, 1991, review of Scotland: An Anthology, p. 30; July 18, 1992, David Wright, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 33; February 11, 1995, Frances Partridge, review of Boyfriends and Girlfriends, p. 34.

Stand, summer, 1993, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 22; spring, 1995, review of Dante's Drum-Kit, p. 57.

Times Educational Supplement, August 23, 1991, Brian Morton, review of Scotland, p. 21; May 29, 1992, Kate Chisholm, review of Scotland, p. 31; June 26, 1992, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 28; December 10, 1993, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 28.

Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 1972; January 31, 1975; October 2, 1981; January 7, 1983; August 19, 1983; May 31, 1985; April 5, 1985; October 21-27, 1988; August 16, 1991, Maurice Lindsay, review of Scotland, p. 21; July 31, 1992, Neil Corcoran, review of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, p. 21; February 4, 1994, Don Paterson, review of Dante's Drum-Kit, p. 22; January 27, 1995, Bernard O'Donoghue, review of Boyfriends and Girlfriends, p. 22; May 26, 1995, Andrew Biswell, review of The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, p. 22; December 19, 1997, Sean O'Brien, review of Selected Poems: 1964-1983, p. 24; June 9, 2000, Roger Caldwell, review of The Donkey's Ears: Politovsky's Letters Home, p. 25.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1975.

Washington Post Book World, August 20, 1995, review of The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories, p. 12.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1995, Carter Kaplan, review of Boyfriends and Girlfriends, p. 794.