Scottish poet Douglas Dunn, whose work explored class, poverty, and grief, died October 16. He was 83. The National reported that the award-winning writer was best known for his poetry collections Terry Street and Elegies, the latter of which won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985. He received an OBE in 2003 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013.
Fellow Scottish poet and former St. Andrews colleague Don Paterson called Dunn "the finest Scottish poet of the post-war period.... Dougie was also someone we knew and loved as a dear friend, mentor and teacher, and he will be deeply missed."
Dunn initially trained as a librarian before moving to the U.S. in 1964, where he worked at a public library in Ohio. He later returned to the U.K. to study English literature at the University of Hull, where he was mentored by poet Philip Larkin.
Dunn's first poetry collection, Terry Street (1969) was published to critical acclaim. Other collections include A Happier Life (1972), Love or Nothing (1974). and Barbarians (1979). He also wrote literary criticism, plays for radio and television, and short stories, including some for the New Yorker that resulted in two collections: Secret Villages (1985) and Boyfriends and Girlfriends (1995).
"Following the death of his wife Lesley from cancer in 1981, Dunn published Elegies, a collection of poems reflecting on grief and loss which became one of his most celebrated works," the National wrote. The book won the Whitbread Prize
He returned to Scotland in the 1980s for a writer-in-residence position at the University of Dundee before moving to the University of St. Andrews, where he became a professor of English and head of the university's Scottish Studies Institute. He retired from the university in 2008.
In a tribute, his publisher, Faber, posted: "We are so sad to learn of the passing of the pre-eminent Scottish poet, Douglas Dunn, whom Faber published for over fifty years, a poet others admired, turned to, learnt from and loved. Our thoughts are with his family and friends."
He "was overjoyed to find himself among the poetic aristocracy at Faber and Faber" when his first book landed there, the Guardian noted. Dunn said he loved being published by "the publisher which issued Eliot, Pound, Auden, Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney. When my copies arrived, I kissed them."
"Attempts to characterize Dunn's poetry and its attachment to moral rigor typically reach for the line, 'My poems should be Clyde-built, crude and sure,' " the Guardian wrote. "But it is equally pertinent to reflect on another snatch of verse, from the poem 'The Apple Tree', published in St. Kilda's Parliament (1981). Our lives, Dunn wrote, 'Crave codes of courtesy, ways of describing love, / And these, in a good-natured land, are ways to weep, / True comfort as you wipe your eyes and try to live.' "