Dunn takes Donne as his text, a sermon in which he neglects God and his angels for the noise of a fly and sets the tone for some self-disparaging, eye for detail and honouring of literary forebears.Sixteen years after his last collection of poems, Douglas Dunn is very recognizably the same poet and, if that much older, his cussedness and accompanying tenderness are undimmed.
Subsequent generations of poets have arrived but that's no reason for him to accommodate their poetry but he takes no offence at the young, only a sanguine complaint against himself. He is a second generation Movement poet, if something reluctant to concede that it ever had a first can have a second. He counts syllables diligently, mixes lyricism with irony, followed in Larkin's wake and is admirable in his observance of much of the 1950's aesthetic.
'Wondrous Strange' takes up the Donne idea of minutiae with,
Now it can almost be heard. But not quite
Almost. Still on the far side of nearly,
which echoes Larkin's 'almost instinct almost true'. And Thursday revisits Toads Revisited,
But I've a problem. It's called 'work ethic', so
I'll slog on with the daily, dreary toil.
Not that he thinks it's worthwhile. As 'the model of a modern academic', he's 'absoultely super at ennui'. If younger poets are prone, or even encouraged, to play up their talents, Dunn prefers to play down his own prodigious gift under a blanket of unforced modesty.
He is a fine visual poet with his 'runic birdprints tracked in frozen snow' and 'spring's predictable daffodils/Bugling yellow silences' and it is his garden that he takes most pleasure in these days, like Michael Longley celebrating home and place. But on later pages, his eyesight is a concern, having made a case for use of all the senses in poetry, in poems about Braille and a monocle.
In Self-Portraits he conflates those of Rembrandt into one of his own. It's a meditation on art and self and not the only poem in the book to read like a manifesto in places. But the longer poems have taken the energetic discursiveness of Dante's Drum-kit and started to ramble a little bit, as Auden is charged with doing in later life. Not in a dull way but not as sharply focussed as earlier poems were.
It was in Dunn that I first recognized the list, which now seems a way of avoiding convoluted syntax. A list of more than three items might offer a choice of things to rhyme on at line-endings if one juggles their order but after more than two or three instances it begins to look like a habit. It can suggest abundance or variety but if overdone it is less than fine poetry, as are a few of his prosaic phrases.
None of which detracts from the number of poems which belong among Dunn's finest. The Nothing-But seeks out the priceless truth from a choice of irritants,
To have kissed the lips of one who was dying
Is to have tasted silence, salt , and wilderness
and it is the 'wilderness' there, 'the desert where there is no lying' where he finds a transcendence equal to anything in his own poetry or that of his generation.
Moments such as that are more impressive coming from one who is so determinedly unimpressed, especially not impressed by himself, and worth more than a bookful of such thoughts from a poet forever striving for them. Dunn is unflinchingly honest and genuine and has no trace of bitterness, only the uplifting generosity of one who finds and celebrates wonder and beauty even if it seems sometimes against the odds. He has continued what seemed like an English tradition - from Hardy, through Edward Thomas, to Larkin - and done it in a devoutly, insistently Scottish way, never apparently too far from his dram and whisky is the rich, deeply-appreciated, characterful drink that his poetry has as its equivalent.