Description
Book SynopsisBeing appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a ?at overlooking Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its native tongues. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. Personal and political roles collided as referenda for Scottish independence and EU membership, then the US elections, signalled that the post-war liberal value system was very much in crisis. This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His town’s de?ning modern disaster – the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands – becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down. But while patriarchy ?ounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian’s eye to bear on both the city’s and our society’s efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe’s ?otsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is re?ected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax – poems which resist any stasis of the imagination. The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Den?ends, and a lion, while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbert’s merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior’s later trade of precision engineer, it ?ts together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.
Trade ReviewA weird mix of Desperate Dan, MacDiarmid and Dostoyevsky… a rare and fantastic voice. -- Fiachra Gibbons * Guardian *
This antithesis of the slim volume bubbles and seethes with wit and polysyllabic adventurousness. -- Edwin Morgan * The Scotsman *
W.N. Herbert's poetic prescription is kill or cure. Herbert specialises in big, spine-burstingly various and formally eclectic books, in both Scots and English, that are always in the end unified by the energy, wit and intellectual adventurousness of their author… several books in one by a writer who should by rights count as several poets in one. -- Patrick McGuinness * The Guardian *
Table of Contents13 Fathership Glosa Good Makar 16 Cuttlefish Bone 17 Nightfishing 20 Broughty Ferry Beach: a renga 23 Balgay Hill 24 Blackness Caganer 25 Ghost Bowling 26 The Dundee Eve 28 Clouds at Night 30 Tay Nocturne 31 The Road Bridge 32 The Three Flies 34 Tay Lightning 36 Beach Terrace 36 i ‘The swans glow grey in the night harbour’ 36 ii ‘Woken by a ghost helicopter’ 37 iii ‘Swans in the smirr’ 37 iv ‘Through some error when I wake up’ 38 v ‘The occasion of a death’ 38 vi ‘The buildings in the river’s reflection’ 39 vii ‘The wind’s inventing whiteness again’ 39 viii ‘Why do we think of them at all, the dead’ 40 The Continuity 41 June Dolphin 42 Kafka Eskimo 44 Rain Habbies 45 Burns’ Night Impromptu 46 Physic 47 Bregus 49 Salary 50 The Swans at Broughty Ferry Beach 52 Sunday Morning Improv 55 The Wreck of the Javanese Princess Algos 59 The Tortoise 61 Kalighat 63 Ganesh is Reading 64 The Losers’ Table 65 Four Songs in the Guangling Style, and a Signature 65 i ‘Wine Madness’ 65 ii ‘Wild Geese on a Sandy River Bank’ 65 iii ‘Confucius after the Death of his Favourite Student’ 66 iv ‘The Woodcutter’s Song’ 66 v ‘Three Day Monk’ 67 Nanjing Nightboat 68 The Two Haircuts 70 An Exotic Dream of Leonora Carrington 71 Teatro Orfeon 74 Keaton in Space 75 Lion in Sidecar 76 Mother Goo 79 The Fathership Jesus Mary and Jetsam 1 82 Verbotentotentanz, i ‘At first, owing to the absence’ 83 A Jesus of the Moon 84 Emmaus, 1997 85 A Jesus of the Mammoths 87 The Muriels 89 A Jesus of the Beetles 91 The Lost Poem 92 Verbotentotentanz, ii ‘Meh skeleton twin’ The Wreck of the Fathership 95 i ‘My father was never old’ 95 Boat 96 iii ‘The yellow man was doomed and knew it’ 97 The Assembling of the Crew 98 v ‘He held up his hand and we watched it tremble’ 98 The Last Voyage 100 Hopkinsian 1 101 viii ‘Eating sibling-quick, too socially’ 102 The Discovery 104 Hopkinsian 2 105 xi ‘He approached it methodically as though’ 105 The Telling of the Wives 106 Hopkinsian 3 107 xiv ‘My father’s hand was larger of palm than mine’ 108 The Report 109 Hopkinsian 4 110 xvii ‘I remember the nurse saying ‘Goodbye’ 110 The Burning of the Mona 112 xix ‘I keep seeing them wrestle you into’ 112 xx ‘Grant them peace, Patron of the sea’ Dundee Doldrums 115 23rd Doldrum Sailors’ Graveyard 116 24th Doldrum ‘Thi Toun as thi homunculus o us’ 117 25th Doldrum ‘Hunkirt wee man in blae skeh blue’ 118 26th Doldrum ‘When the ghaists o thi dinged doon’ 119 27th Doldrum ‘Tae loup intae nithin’ 120 28th Doldrum ‘Fellini fiss oan thi Nummer 73’ 121 29th Doldrum The Fireman’s Daughter 122 30th Doldrum Snugs 123 31st Doldrum Cloud City Executive Quatrains/Captain my Captain 126 1 inaugural rain/‘In an attempt to circumvent terrible times’ 127 2 the misrule/‘Language you were always going to tell us’ 128 3 a gowfbaa welcomes a bawbag tae balmoral/‘What is it like this to imagine someone’ 129 4 if in doubt, bomb/‘To listen as ekphrasis is an act of praise’ 130 5 strait is the visit/‘The high desert for your ocean floor’ 132 6 golfo de la empatía/‘You knew from the inside of childhood’ 133 7 der totentango/‘The mess of ages has got into the messages’ 134 8 sonetto per trumpo solo/‘Caged in renegado cabin’ 135 9 memento aurantium/‘The great moment keeps passing’ Jesus Mary and Jetsam 2 138 Verbotentotentanz, iii ‘It’s braa when ye’re deid’ 140 Helen in the Bardo 144 On Napkins 146 The Municipal Labyrinth 147 On Cutlery 149 Letter to Cath Jenkins 151 On Brown Paper Bags 153 Verbotentotentanz, iv ‘This thing you’re in’ 155 Death Wullie Nostos 159 Cold City 160 The Sleepers 161 Byron’s Mask 161 Follow Me 162 Fish-fight at the Basilica Cisterns 163 The Dream of the Airport 164 Pagomenos 166 Portokáli 167 Zone 168 How to Drink Ellenikós Kafés in Emprosneros 169 Kombolói 171 Maroudianá 173 Whose English Is It Anyway? Bad Makar 176 Tyne Valley Section 180 North of the Book 182 The Calotype 183 To a Ploughman 184 The Parliaments of Birds 186 Showing Sharon Olds the Carcasses in St Andrews 187 Kirsty Wark on Broughty Ferry Beach, Or, An Indy Ref Ode 189 Explaining Irn Bru to the English 190 The Farewell to Jim Murphy (et al) 192 To a Rat 194 Bad Makar McGonagalliana 194 i The Resurrection of William McGonagall 194 ii McGonagall and the Burns Statue 195 iii McGonagall as a Dog 195 iv McGonagall and the Baxter Park Pavilion 196 v Ode tae Yet Anither Dundee Railway Station 197 vi Address to the Girders 197 vii Broughty Ferry Blackout 198 viii Address to the Dundee V&A 201 Ode to the USS Discovery (Season One) 203 The Couthier 204 Undeed 206 Mastercannibal 209 Owed to Groucho’s 210 Remains of Doggerland 212 Rogues Reparcelled 214 The Fall of Brexitopolis 216 Gunlandia 218 The Nine Trades Welcome You to the City of Refuge 220 Il Futuro 222 Dirt Bath 225 The Giantess 229 Notes
