Douglas Dunn

Encompassing magical fairy tales and modern innovative works, The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories surveys the rich literary heritage of Scotland, in a collection of forty-four superb tales, the most extensive such anthology in print. Here readers will discover such wonderful tales as "The Wee Bannock," Sir Walter Scott's classic "The Two Drovers" (widely considered the first true short story ever written), Muriel Spark's "Bang-Bang You're Dead," and James Kelman's "Sunday Papers." Not only are the finest writers of the past well represented-including familiar faces such as Sir James Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson--but there's also a host of superb modern writers here as well, such as Shena MacKay, Alan Spence, Margaret Elphinstone, Ronald Frame, and Janice Galloway, to name but a few. With a highly informative and insightful introduction by Douglas Dunn, one of Scotland's leading literary figures, this anthology offers a revealing look at the best of Scottish writing.

The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories

Jean Racine

Douglas Dunn's translation of Racine's play was commissioned by the BBC's radio drama department as part of their season of French classical drama. Faithful to the original, it yet manages to read like a modern play in English.

Andromache

Selected Poems, 1964-1983

The Noise of a Fly is the first collection from Douglas Dunn in sixteen years, and the first since he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013. It is a book brimming with warmth, mischief and a self-deprecating humour, as well as with a charming, 'Larkinesque' crankiness: a quarrel with ageing, an impatience with youth, the grievousness of losing friends and colleagues. But for all its intimate, hearthside rumination, this is a volume of poems that looks outward in equal measure: at Scottish independence, British politics and an international refugee crisis, and reflects unflinchingly on what it is to consider oneself a contributor to society. Penned with a dexterous wit and a steady nerve, The Noise of a Fly is a mesmeric imagining of our later years by one of this country's most senior and celebrated writers. 'It is hard to think of many poets who can equal his combination of imaginative ambition, formal resource and range of tone . . . Written on these terms, poetry is a matter of permanent urgency.' Sean O'Brien 'The most respected Scottish poet of his generation.' Nicholas Wroe

The Noise of a Fly

Crockett, as well as work by writers as varied as John Davidson, Violet Jacob, Neil Gunn, Eric Linklater, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray, and James Kelman. Younger writers are strongly represented; among them such talents as Ronald Frame, Janice Galloway, and A. L. Kennedy.

A model for personal and community advancement demonstrated through the allegory of a fantasy parable. When a successful business person from our world stumbles into an exotic, subterranean civilization, long hidden from the Outside world, he is exposed to new ways of thinking and feeling, but also exposes others to a world of harsh and cruel violence. The Outside world is rich in technological wonders but is plagued by violent terror and social injustice, while the Cave People of Enrisa thrive in an advanced, harmonious social order of cheerful, happy "compassionate joy" that is industrially primitive. When the world is turned inside out, and the cave people of Enrisa come face to face with the Outside world, both cultures are confronted with strange new wonders!

Dazhan

Norman Ackroyd

Majestic, dramatic, and undeniably beautiful, the British coastline has inspired artists and writers for centuries. In this exquisite volume, it gives birth to a landmark collaboration between award-winning poet Douglas Dunn and one of Britains foremost artists, Norman Ackroyd. This eagerly awaited new collection of Dunns poems finds perfect harmony with Ackroyds atmospheric landscapes, which provide a visual response to the evocative beauty of Dunns verse. An introduction by Dunn, examines the rich literary and artistic tradition of chronicling the variety and splendor of the British coastline, Ackroyds subtle aquatints document the wide range of natural features that characterize it.

A Line in the Water

The collected writings of Douglas Dunn; with drawings by Mimi Gross. The writing are from 1972 through 2012; most were previously published in various dance publications.

Collected Writings of Douglas Dunn

Dancer Out of Sight

The rumoured city is elusive, a place of character and commerce, a bustling port in the north of England, but also an historic city with tree-lined roads, in recent years the home of many artists and writers. Not the mythical northern town of the fifties' novel, but a place of generous characters which - says Douglas Dunn - 'encourages an imaginative response to corners and details, sights and sounds, the effects of light and the seasons.' Introducing this anthology of new poets from Hull, Douglas Dunn describes their home as 'a town which by its nature recommends the plainly human.' An estuary city, Hull has a marginal, provisional, almost frontier quality.'For Philip Larkin, Hull is 'a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance.' In his foreword Larkin writes: 'A place cannot produce poems: it can only not prevent them, and Hull is good at that... These poems are not about Hull, yet is unseen in all of them, the permission of a town that lets you write.' If this anthology is any guide, what the rumoured city allows and nourishes is imaginative depth, diversity of style, and an openness to the world and to the resources of language.The poets included are: Peter Didsbury, Tony Flynn, Ian Gregson, T.F. Griffin, Douglas Houston, Margot K. Juby, Sean O'Brien, Tony Petch, Genny Rahtz and Frank Redpath. A Rumoured City was published at the same time as Peter Didsbury's first collection The Butchers of Hull.

New Poets from Hull

A Rumoured City

St. Kilda's Parliament

New and Selected Poems, 1966-1988

Europa's Lover is a new long poem celebrating Europe and European culture. In the poem Europa is the mother of Europe, its daughters, wife, sisters, nieces, lover and companion. 'She is also her own mother, daughters, wife, etc,' writes Douglas Dunn. 'If this sounds a lunatic faith in femininity, then so be it. I've seen her in dreams and felt her to be present in places which are sacred to me. What happens in the poem is that Europa invites a young man to join her. He does so; he meditates, makes speeches, and she talks to him. Otherwise the poem is about Things in General. It embodies a certain respect for the values of the West, in spite of its terrors, mistakes, humiliations and decline.'

Europa's Lover

During the 1920s, Scottish poetry, personified by Hugh MacDiarmid, asserted its independence, denying the claim made by T. S. Eliot that all significant differences between Scottish and English literature had ceased to exist. It was an energetic 'No' to provincialism, and a vigorous 'Yes' to nationalism as an enabler of poetry. On its first appearance in 1992, the retrospective and organising vision of Douglas Dunn's now-classic anthology revealed a profounder level of achievement in modern Scottish poetry - whether in Scots, Gaelic or English - than had been formerly acknowledged, and introduced an entire canon of writing to a wider readership, edited with discrimination and exemplary lucidity.

Twentieth-century Scottish Poetry

Terra rima, the form which Douglas Dunn calls 'Dante's Drum-kit', supplies him with the structure for his own meditation on the afterlife, 'Disenchantments'. Other poems in this book are evidence of the author's dazzling technical adroitness. High seriousness and high jinks are equally at his command, and readers will welcome a collection which shows the poet of Elegies and Northlight performing with undiminished energy and stylishness.

Dante's Drum-kit

Douglas Dunn on Philip Larkin

Under the Influence

This collection opens with a wry elegy for three fellow Scots poets, it remembers other teachers and precursors and revisits scenes of Dunn's earliest poems. Dunn focuses on conundrums of solitude, and the solidarity of the dreaming man in a wider world.

The Year's Afternoon

A generous selection of poems from 'one of the most talented and interesting poets writing in English today' (Robert Nye). In a distinguished poetic career, Douglas Dunn has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year. New Selected Poems 1964-1999 draws substantially upon the entire range of Dunn's poetry, from Terry Street (1969) to The Year's Afternoon (2000), and confirms his place 'among the finest of our poets' (Melvin Bragg).

New Selected Poems, 1964-2000

Northlight

Poems explore the author's relationship with his wife and portray his grief after her death

Douglas Dunn

Books

Your next favorite book is out there