Search results for ""Author Douglas Dunn""

Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1985, these poems were written after the death of Douglas Dunn's first wife in March 1981.

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From tales of the supernatural to pungent social realism, and from the humorous to the disturbing, whether rural or urban, this anthology shows the vitality of the Scottish short story. Douglas Dunn's eclectic selection displays the marvellous range of Scottish story-telling, beginning with three early traditional tales, and including a wealth of writers from the last three centuries: amongst them Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Violet Jacob, Neil Gunn, Eric Linklater, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and younger talents such as Ronald Frame, Janice Galloway, and A. L. Kennedy.

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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 1964-2000 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).

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Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 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

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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.

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A wonderfully sustained narrative poem, full of the resonances and repercussions attendant on the end of an era, The Donkey's Ears depicts life aboard a Russian flagship just before the battle of Tsushima, 1905. It purports to be written by E.S. Politovsky, a ship's engineer addressing his wife in letters back home. Known as 'The Trafalgar of the East', Tsushima (which, translated from the Japanese, means 'The Donkey's Ears' - a description of the twin peaks of the islands) was the biggest naval gun-battle in history. The action of the poem takes place before the battle. A vividly realized claustrophobia prevails. Life below and on deck is brilliantly detailed as is the sense of incipient doom; one man's voice (domestic, particular, yearning for wife and home comforts) pitched against the inexorable onslaught of events.

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