Terry Street

by Douglas Dunn

mass

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

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

[Declan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book of poetry I bought, while still a schoolboy, was this one. It was so good that most of the poetry books I bought subsequently disappointed me. The usual story of first love...

You can hear and read "A Removal From Terry Street" here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryar...

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Terry Street poems knocked me out. Dunn is my new spirit animal.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was Douglas Dunn’s debut collection. It is divided into two rather different parts. The first long sequence comprises 18 poems describing the working-class neighbourhood of Terry Street in Hull. The very first poem, “The Clothes Pit”, reveals, with its mention of International Times and some Britons “getting high on pot”, that this material was written in the era of Swinging London. But as is often remarked, England was only swinging inside a narrow scene, while the rest of the country remained bleak. It is this humdrum life that Dunn documents in poetry: dissatisfied marriages, dull jobs, cosmetics and fashions as a meagre adornment on an impoverished life, alcoholism, and menial jobs.

Dunn was at Hull at the same time as Philip Larkin, and his poetry can readily be categorized among the Movement. Yet what is missing from Dunn’s verse is the personality that Larkin had, the feeling that Movement poetry might describe tiny lives and dashed hopes, but it can also describe the poet himself as a hell of a character. This poetry is all description of what the poet sees with little insight into the poet it came from. Moreover, there is no real music to these poems that I, at any rate, pick up on and my continual response to this volume was “unimpressed”

The remainder of the volume looks to landscapes of the region farther afield than Terry Street. “South Bank of the Humber” is one of the few poems here that I can muster any enthusiasm for due to its tightness and strong central image:

Brickworks, generators of cities, break up
And then descend, sustaining no wages.
A sheet of corrugated iron smacks against a wall,
The wing of a pre-biological, inorganic bird.
It is the laughter of permanence,
The laughter of metal in a brickfield becoming dust.

In this second part the poet sometimes talks about himself, set within a limited context of bonds to parents or vague love affairs that Movement poetry embraced, but Dunn himself is still a cipher and the poems forgettable. I am really baffled that this volume got such a warm welcome upon its publication, since the later poetry by Dunn that I have looked at seems much stronger (if never very great in my own estimation).

[Abigail · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few interesting lines:

"bottles / placed neatly on window sills, beside cats" Are cats neatly placed too?

"Those we secretly love, who never know of us, / What happens to them? Only this is known. / They will never meet us suddenly in pleasant rooms."

"Trees become less polite"

"If water fell on me now / I think I would grow"