The Scottish poet Douglas Dunn has died at the age of 83. Here is one of the poems that first made his name:
On Roofs of Terry Street
Television aerials, Chinese characters
in the lower sky, wave gently in the smoke.
Nest-building sparrows peck at moss,
urban flora and fauna, soft, unscrupulous.
Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.
A builder is repairing someone’s leaking roof.
He kneels upright to rest his back.
His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.
Douglas Dunn
The May 1968 edition of the London Magazine published some of Dunn’s poems, and illustrated them with photographs of the area by Robert Whitaker. The poem appeared on page 14.
Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, in 1942 and trained as a librarian. While working in Ohio in the mid-1960s he received his US call-up papers, left the country to avoid the draft, and went to Hull University to study English. He and his wife, Lesley, bought a house in a small terrace off Terry Street, just off the Beverley Road. They lived there for two years, though the area had been condemned as unfit for human habitation. He graduated with first-class honours in 1969.
That year he published Terry Street, his first collection, which won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. He was working in the university library, where Philip Larkin was librarian, and Larkin’s recommendation helped bring the book to Faber. The poems look closely and without sentimentality at working-class life. On Roofs of Terry Street shows what Dunn did best, finding dignity in ordinary labour.
Lesley died of cancer in 1981, and his best-known book, Elegies (1985), grew out of that loss. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year. He later became Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, received an OBE in 2003 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013, and was an influential editor, critic, and mentor to other poets.
Carol Ann Duffy called him one of the greatest poets Scotland has produced, and Don Paterson called him “the finest Scottish poet of the post-war period.”
In Clive James’s 1974 book-length comic poem, “Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World”, Dunn became Douglas Dunge, “a moralising bard of wide remark”.
Featured image: Not Hull, but Newcastle: Detail from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen — Byker Rooftops in Mist
This is so interesting. Not a poet I know. I wonder what they built in place of the old back to backs? High rise perhaps?
Hi Frances,
Here’s what I’ve been able to establish: Terry Street was (and is) in the Stepney district of Hull. The original back-to-back houses that Douglas Dunn knew were demolished. The wider neighbourhood today is mixed-use, with housing, supermarkets, commercial sites, industrial units and community facilities. A former railway line that ran nearby has been converted into a walking and cycling route. One specific piece of evidence appears in Hull City Council’s planning records. In 1992, permission was sought to build six two-storey buildings containing 32 flats, together with new access roads and parking areas, on the north side of Terry Street (east of Park Road).