Contemporary poets 22: Douglas Dunn
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Your support makes all the difference.Born in Renfrewshire in 1942, Douglas Dunn made a striking debut in 1969 with Terry Street, a sequence of poems about Hull, where he had studied as an undergraduate and was then living and working as a librarian. He went on to publish several more acclaimed collecyions, including Brabrians, St. Kilda's Parliament and the moving series of poems to his dead wife, Elegies, which won the 1985 Whitbread Book of the Year award. His most recent volume is Northlight (1988). He has also written radio and television plays, as well as publishing a collection of short stories, Secret Villages. Now remarried, Dunn lives and teaches in Scotland.
JUST STANDING THERE
It's a wooden bridge, an ordinary bridge, a small one, on which I've stood many times, looking into the fast, earthy water, watching oddments sail by, rose-prunings from an upstream garden, twigs, litter, sometimes a flowerhead, observing waterside botany immersed, dragged, but never drowned. For years though, I crossed the stream on my daily walk, ignoring that deep burn, or glancing at it.
Then I looked to leaning on the timber parapet, staring into the fishless flood - or I've seen no fish
Ever in hundreds of quiet looking, and if it dwindles in summer it is not by much, just enough for an inch or two of bank to dry out, for a tuft to lift its hair up from the tugging, onward rinse. Insignificant, small, an ordinary wooden bridge.
It became a platform for a fifteen minute staring into liquid muscle, a stamina that no-one else has in mind or body - a cliche even of little rivers
Or any patch of ground, stone, or man-outliving tree. Commonplace as it is,, it still took years to learn, it took years to hear its several pitcheds of babble, watery lore encompassing tenderness and rage, always the same water, and never the same.
This is not an ordinary, small wooden bridge.
It doesn't cross from reality to spirit, but, in the middle, where I stand, leaning on the parapet, silent truth in me listens to a running giant let loose in in unlocked liberty, as free as water
Drugged with its destination in the firth and sea.
At a precise spot of nowhere and timelessness
within myself a door I can go through and be invisible, in a room also invisible or from which I come back without memory othe than languageless noise in the ears such as can be recalled clearly but never spoken.
(Photograph omitted)
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