Love or Nothing

by Douglas Dunn

minor shelf wear only

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Douglas Eaglesham Dunn is a Scottish poet, academic and critic.

He was a Professor of English at the University of St Andrews from 1991, becoming Director of the University's Scottish Studies Centre in 1993 until his retirement in September 2008. He is now an Honorary Professor at St Andrews, still undertaking postgraduate supervision in the School of English. He was a member of the Scottish Arts Council (1992–1994). He holds an honorary doctorate (LL.D., law) from the University of Dundee, an honorary doctorate (D.Litt., literature) from the University of Hull and St Andrews. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. Terry Street, Dunn's first collection of poems, appeared in 1969 and received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award as well as a Somerset Maugham Award.

Reviews

[James Askari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dunn is well into mid-career in this, his third collection. He's chiefly a poet of atmospheres--an orchard in winter, a post-Gray cemetery of the disappointed, though also, and more resonantly, of the aftermath of shipbuilding and industrial production on the Clyde. Some material is autobiographical. He tells us he was born on the night of El Alamein; one richer boy looked down on him when he tried to play with the toy Hurricanes both had; he eventually gave his away out of pity to a boy from Govan. In a way continuous with Edwin Morgan, Dunn finds collective experience as interesting, and worthy of commemoration, as subjective; but the speaker of his poems is still the lyric subject, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes the self after a certain displacement--an 'unlucky mariner' (Dunn apparently served in the Merchant Navy), a Symbolist poet, the brother of a 'fallen woman' in the 1920s. The writing is odd and interesting, though always unshowy, defiant most noticeably in dictional choices ('ecstasisers', 'vascular') and in its free verse.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's no one I'd rather be called 'famous' by.
They have an antique goldfish, a cat named Sly.