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480 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
Noted for experimental ‘concrete’ poetry, which makes visual images
of words and letters, he is also a lyric poet, and acute observer of the
city of Glasgow, where he has lived and worked most of his life. Like
many poets, he is also an academic, and his volume of essays,
interviews, and observations, Nothing Not Sending Messages (1992),
gives useful insights into his Collected Poems published in 1990.
When love comes late, but fated,
the very ground seems on fire with tongues of running time,
and conscious hearts are speaking
of the long vistas closed in clouds
by lonely waters, all goodbyes
where the swallow is a shadow
swooping back, like youth, to silence,
If all goodbyes could be drowned in one welcome,
and the pains of waiting be washed from a hundred streetcorners,
and dry rebuffs and grey regrets, backs marching into rain
slip like a film from the soiled spirit made new –
I’d take that late gift, and those tongues
of fire would burn out in our
thankful fountains, to the sea.
(The Welcome)
Douglas Dunn, with Terry Street (1969), Elegies (1985), Northlight (1988),
and Dante’s Drum Kit (1993), has been called the major Scottish poet of
his generation. Strongly political in much of his work, he challenges Sir
Walter Scott’s turning ‘our country round upon its name/ And time’. Dunn’s
nationalist sentiment is concerned with common, popular experience,
underlying recorded history. The elegies written on the death of his wife
– Elegies (1985) – display an emotional range allied with a technical
mastery which has taken Dunn’s work on to new levels of achievement.
Some of the major poetry of recent years focuses on place, and the
language used to evoke its setting. Seamus Heaney has described Ted
Hughes’s sensibility as ‘pagan in the original sense; a heath-dweller’, in
direct contrast with the urban concerns of Larkin. Heaney, himself attracted
to the peatbog, its wildness, and its capacity to preserve, celebrates his
contemporaries, saying, ‘all that I really knew about the art [of poetry]