BURNS NIGHT: TWO REVIEWS OF *MODERN* SCOTTISH POETS
Leon Cych
Scottish poets writing today. A Burns Night Posting.
All copyright remains with Brian Docherty, this text is freely
available providing it is kept in its entirety and all sources quoted.
NEGOTIATING A CLIMATE OF OPINION
DOUGLAS DUNN, DANTE'S DRUM-KIT, FABER, 6.99
DOUGLAS DUNN, (ed.) FABER BOOK OF TWENTIETH CENTURY SCOTTISH POETRY
Douglas Dunn, born in 1942, belongs to a generation of poets that includes
Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Tony Harrison. Like Heaney and Harrison,
he comes from a background that could be seen as provincial and
working-class, yet like them he was a first generation academic success. All
three have been teachers and lecturers as well as poets and translators.
(Dunn is now a professor of English at the University of St.Andrews,
although he worked as a librarian for many years). Another thing they have
in common is a shared belief in the values of formalism, put to use in a
poetry which moves from the personal to the social to a principled
engagement with politics. Community and family values have remained
important to these poets, in a way which distances Dunn from his putative
mentor, Larkin. It is difficult to imagine Larkin, or any of the 'chaps'
from oxford writing as Dunn did recently, a pamphlet called Poll Tax : The
Fiscal Fake. But then, perhaps the pressures for a poet to write for a
general audience, and the hope that it will be read, are more urgent in
Scotland.
As someone who left Scotland 20 years ago, I have little sense of the
grass-roots politics there, and how writers such as Dunn or James Kelman
relate to this. Likewise, I have as little sense of the poetic community
there as I have of that in Huddersfield, Newcastle or Belfast. I have to
infer the current state of affairs from magazines and new books. Certainly
in 1974, which was before I started writing, I had no sense of how the
poetry business operated in Glasgow. although Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard,
Edwin Morgan, Stewart Conn et al must have been active then. Now of course
it is totally different, with Scottish poets well represented in the New
Generation promo, and Duffy, Kay, Jamie, Crawford, Herbert and many others,
all under 40, promising to provide good poetry for many years to come.
Arguably the last big grouping to reach prominence was the Northern Ireland
poets and that is now some time ago, and despite the posturings of the
Huddersfield self-publicists, it seem obvious that for the forgeable future,
influentual poetry will speak in any of a variety of Scottish accents.
It is therefore opportune that Faber have brought out Douglas Dunn's new
book and his edition of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry now. The anthology
is a large and generous one, some 420 pages of poetry with a long and cogent
essay by Dunn, who by the way, excluded himself. This sort of anthology
generally serves 3 purposes. Leaving aside the question of whether a single
book can (or should) define the canon in a particular area, it will be used,
among other purposes, as an introduction to the field, as a present, either
for a friend or someone who wants a reference book,and as a teaching text
for undergraduates, evening classes, and other poetry courses. In each of
these areas, it will succeed admirably. For anyone who wants one
representative book of modern Scottish poetry, it will do nicely, and I
cannot imagine a poetry lover who finds this stuffed into their Xmas
stocking feeling disappointed. As a teaching anthology it will also be
useful, and should provoke students to go off and read more widely. As far
as I can judge, Dunn has made a real effort to be inclusive, although
another 30 pages would have allowed him to represent the younger poets more
fully. (obviously deadlines meant that for instance, the latest work of
W.N.Herbert and Kathleen Jamie could not be included).
It would be easy to quibble over some selections and omissions ( it is a
pity that A.C.Jacobs was not included, and Thomas A.Clark is a major
omission, especially since Clark's work helps put Kenneth White into
persective ) but nearly always, Dunn's selections are judicious and assured.
It could be argued that women are under-represented, but personally I cannot
think of a Scottish woman poet active between say, 1955-75, and being
published. It is good to see John Davidson (an influence on Eliot )
represented, and poems by Violet Jacob, Marion Angus, Helen B.Cruickshank,
Rachel Annand Taylor, Muriel Spark and Elma Mitchell in the first third of
the book, but Dunn has rightly given more space to the major figures such as
Edwin Muir and Hugh Macdiarmid. All three linguistic traditions, Braid
Scots, English and Gaelic, are represented, with Robert Garioch, Norman
MacCaig, Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith shown to advantage. The
Gaelic poets, such as MacLean, Aongus MacNeacail, George Hay Campbell and
Derick Thomson are given in Gaelic with an English version following in
italics. (but where are the younger Gaelic poets such as Christopher Whyte
and Meg Bateman). William MacIllvanney, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Gerry
Mangan and Frank Kuppner, and Edwin Morgan speak for and about Glasgow,
while Robert Crawford, W.N.Herbert and Kathleen Jamie speak for the East
Coast. It is also good to see the relatively neglected Veronica
Forrest-Thompson included.
No doubt Dunn was aware that Polygon was planning a book of younger poets
(now available as Dream State : The New Scottish Poets ) and wished to avoid
overlap, so complaining about poets being missed out or some getting more
space than others is pointless. Dunn's Introduction, 'Language and Liberty'
, takes issue with T.S.Eliot's essay, 'Was There A Scottish Literature' and
goes on to consider the relations between language, literature, culture and
politics. He sets the great modernists such as Muir, MacDiarmid and MacLean
in context, and discusses the various influences on the younger poets, while
Burns, Sir Walter Scott and William MacGonagall look down from the
mantelpiece. Dunn has certainly filled in the blanks in my map of Scottish
poetry and I am sure that both the general reader and the student of poetry
will find Dunn's account both informative and stimulating.
If we discount the Selected Poems 1964-83, Dante's Drum-Kit is Dunn's 8th
volume and presumably written during the period he was editing the
anthology. It is a large book, some 145 pages, and unlike Muldoon's The
Annals of Chile, not inflated by printing 2 or 3 stanzas to a page. The book
mixes longer poems with short lyrics, sometimes grouped together, and while
I think the blurb's gush about 'dazzling technical adroitness' is
overstated, Dunn handles the technical elements with confidence and
dexterity. His rhythms are solid, his metric competent, and his rhymes for
the most part well handled. Again, comparisons with Longley and Harrison
come to mind ; these are well-crafted poems. Dunn is decent and civilised
bur never dull, and while you couldn't call his work exciting or radical, I
suspect that this is the sort of poetry that most poetry lovers recognise
and like. Good Radio 4 stuff if you like.
These are the poems of a man who at 50, is most of the way through his
professional life, and the book has a double perspective. The title poem,
some 16 pages of terza rima, is a meditation on what might be to come, while
various short poems look back to childhood or adolescence. Dunn was a
librarian in Hull, and in Libraries: A Celebration he reflects on this life
(with P.Larkin for boss) with considerablymore affection that one of his
Hull proteges, Sean O'Brien displays in his library poems in H.M.S.
Glasshouse. There is also a series of poems on the poor and dispossessed,
Moorlander, The Crossroads of the Birds, Bare Ruined Choirs, The Penny
Gibbet, Gaberlunzie, Body Echoes, Swigs, and Poor Peoples Cafes. Some of
these are contemporary while others are set in Scotland's past. It could be
argued that for some people, things have either changed little or regressed
to the 18th century, especially since some politicians seem determined to
return us to a state more brutal than anything depicted by Hogarth. Dunn's
poetry acts as an honourable witness to the state of the nation and invites
us to respond. ( Not by agit-prop or exhortation ; he depicts the scenes of
down and outs for example, and leaves the reader to construct their own
response. )
It is not all dour politics of course ; Dunn is a good comic poet when he
wants to be. Extra Helpings is an affectionate portrait of his schooldays
and his eating habits with a fine singable chorus, and there are poems on
gardening, an ode to his desk, and an account of the importance of Auden for
the young Dunn in 1960. The book finishes with another long public poem,
Dressed To Kill, written for a BBC film. While perhaps less bitter than
Hamish Henderson's Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, like them it is an
eloquent account of the brutality and pointlessness of warfare. Dunn's
particular concern is with Scottish soldiers, especially the kilted Highland
regiments, dubbed by the terrified Germans in world War 1, the ladies from
Hell. Dunn explores the irony that besides being a dreadful business in its
own right, the British Empire's various wars since 1745 have largely been
fought by the poor from the Highlands and Glasgow. (For many years the 51st
Highland Light Infantry had a barracks in the Maryhill district of Glasgow).
For many Scots, risking mutilation and death on behalf of the British Empire
was preferable to poverty and starvation. As Hamish Henderson put it, 'We
fought England's battles Sir/to the dreiping knife Sir'. Dressed To Kill is
a candid interrogation of the violence inherent in Scottish popular culture
and questons the validity of notions of patriotism and nationalism. This
work along, with the Introduction to the Faber Book of Twentieth Century
Scottish Poetry should be required reading for members of the Burns Cult,
nationalists of any stripe, and parochialists who want the Scotland of their
choice and their choice only, and canna thole onybuhdy else's unco notions.
(c) BRIAN DOCHERTY Jan 1995
Poetry London Newsletter (Hardcopy) is Southern England's biggest
poetry magazine. We hope you have enjoyed this preview review. If you
wish to see a hardcopy sample of the latest magazine, send (Sterling) 9.00
to:
PLN,
PO BOX 4LF,
London W1A 4LF
***************************** 'History is a nightmare
* poe...@poetry.demon.co.uk * from which I am trying to awake'
***************************** James Joyce