Alan Riach on Douglas Dunn, Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead

They bear little trace of the significance Scotland would have for him later, and yet A Poem in Praise of the British discloses a hard irony that has been a characteristic of all his work:

Heavy rain everywhere washes up the bones of the British.

Where did all that power come from, the wish

To be inert, but rich and strong,

to have too much?

The politicised quality of the question is disillusioned and wry, distanced but impassioned.

In Ships, Dunn specifies “restless boys” in Ayrshire, looking out at the Clyde estuary as a ship goes by, thinking that they, too, might have gone away, as they sit in their futility, “in the glass cafés, / Over their American soft drinks”.

His earlier poetry arises from such everyday objects, moments, people and places around him, plangently annotating tones and occasions of loss, regret, survival and qualities of social redundancy in the world around him, but he broke new ground with Elegies (1985).

He was recognised for the work in this book as a poet whose self-constraint held depths of sorrow and understanding and a fundamental sense of human decency, and he has maintained and developed these strengths throughout his later poetry.

He gives his account in Northlight (1988) of his own transition back to Scotland from previous residence in England, a major reconfiguration of his own life story, as he experienced that story through the work of chance and will, sometimes through terrible, unpredictable occasions of loss, sometimes through wilfully decisive moments in which choices were made. In Here and There, Dunn talks about his commitment to “a regenerate // Country in which to reconstruct a self / From local water, timber, light and earth” and observes, “fidelity directs / Love to this place, the eye to what it sees”. As he settles into residence on the east coast of Scotland, in Fife, the poetry tries out its habitation and grows into the place. Going to Aberlemno begins:

By archaeologies of air,

Folkways of kirks and parishes

Revised by salty haar,

You reach the previous

Country, the picturesque

And the essential east

And he finds that “A Pictish dialect, / Above a bridged Forth, cries / For lyric nationhood”. Another chapter was beginning.

Dunn became Professor of English at the University of St Andrews in 1991. His work developed its qualities of scrupulous critical attention to detail and meticulous appetite for everyday realities.

Linguistically as much as socially, his attention to political questions has always been keen, and not afraid to be sometimes unfashionable. His achievement as a stylist in the English language is matched by his unfazed seriousness and uneasy acumen.

As editor of The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (1992) he had a significant influence on how modern Scottish poetry was read, and his introduction to that book is a strong-minded enquiry into the particularities and limitations of its subject, both historically across the century and as a means of categorising a body of work by national identity, in the knowledge that poetry does not march to a flag.

In The Year’s Afternoon (2000), the everyday comes into alignment with professional expertise in such poems as A Theory of Literary Criticism (with its commemoration of Pablo Neruda in Chile). In Three Poets, Dunn’s elegy for Norman MacCaig, Sorley MacLean and George Mackay Brown, who all died in the same year, he locates himself in that transitional generation between theirs, and before them, MacDiarmid’s, and that which followed: “Come, friends, it is time now to drink / To three poets. It is time to sit quietly and read, / Hearing them speak their lines, those whom we succeed”. Few poets could have said that with such understated intensity, gravitas and inclusiveness. The Noise of a Fly (2017) takes the sense of solitary fortitude into a world of acknowledged vulnerability and ageing, without the futilities of self-pity or arrogance, and keeps that steely irony and human sympathy central, and stronger than ever.

Tom Leonard (b 1944), pictured below, whose poems in Intimate Voices (1984) and prose works collected in Reports from the Present (1995) made a major, singular eruption in general literary sensibility, insists upon the validity of working-class experience and language, and demonstrates that validity in poems and essays of untiring moral ferocity and sometimes wild humour.

The prospect of comedy in the phonetic representation of speech in Unrelated Incidents belies the deadly seriousness of the point being made about speech, language, class and power. This is most evident in the second poem of the sequence, where the difference between “yir eyes / n / yir ears” is elaborated on the page, as the reader is advised to think “aboot thi dif- / frince tween / sound / n object n / symbol” and assured that, “as god said ti / adam” he didn’t care if the “apple” was to be called “an aippl” so long as his orders to leave it alone were dutifully obeyed.

Few poets (Jeremy Prynne might be one other) have been so committed to small press publications and timely interventions, in booklets, pamphlets and ephemeral publications to which the entire Scottish literary and cultural community responded immediately: Six Glasgow Poems (1969), A Priest Came on at Merkland Street (1970), Ghostie Men (1980), If Only Bunty Was Here (1979), Satires & Profanities (1982), Glasgow, My Big Bridie (1983), Situations Theoretical and Contemporary (1986), Two Members’ Monologues (1989), Nora’s place (1990), and On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, Commonly Known as “the Gulf War” (1991).

Leonard’s major contributions to literary scholarship are in two books, Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War (1990), which Leonard edited, and which opened a whole world of poets based in urban Scotland, writing about conditions of squalor and deprivation in explicit literary resistance to oppression, and in stark contrast to conventional 19th-century Scottish pastoral poems; and in his biography of James Thomson (“B.V.”), Places of the Mind (1993), which reviewed and revised the understanding of the value and significance of the poet of The City of Dreadful Night and forcefully demonstrated the value and place of Thomson (1834-82) in the account of modern English-language poetry generally, and modern Scottish poetry in particular.

After Leonard’s scholarly work, literary histories had to be rewritten. His own work has been collected in Access to the Silence (2004), Outside the Narrative (2009) and Definite Articles: Selected Prose 1975-2012 (2013).

With Edwin Morgan’s example and encouragement, a new generation of Scottish poets began publishing in the 1970s, pre-eminently Liz Lochhead (b 1947), pictured below, whose first book, Memo for Spring (1972), was welcomed as heralding a new voice in Scottish poetry.

Here was work by a young woman, dealing with domestic and intimate relationships, in a style that combined in a new way seriousness and humour.

The poems are sharp, cutting, and deliver the priorities of feminism while maintaining an openness to a non-exclusive readership. They are convincing by virtue of tone and angle of approach rather than by polemic or exclamation.

This is a lyric poetry whose political intent and effect was sly, subtle, subversive and unshakeably good-humoured.

Lochhead’s second book, Islands (1978), was a record of her encounters with the Inner and then the Outer Hebrides, so while there was a central gravitational authority in her upbringing in Lanarkshire and Glasgow, where she attended the city’s School of Art and also worked as a schoolteacher, there was an increasing openness not only to geographical distance but to the voices and experiences of others.

Lochhead broke open the way for a number of other Scottish women poets to be more widely heard and read and appreciated, beginning with poems exploring her own experience as a young woman in Lanarkshire in the 1960s and 1970s and developing her skills in creating personae and characters through writing dramatic monologues and original plays.

Her attention to interpersonal relationships, domestic situations, gestures and emotions in local or intimate contexts, is not an evasion of “the big questions” but a different approach to them.

This was most evident in her work as adaptor of traditional fairy or folk tales, in The Grimm Sisters (1979) and Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems (1984), her development of dramatic monologues, in True Confessions and New Clichés (1985) and then her work as a playwright in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987) and her versions of classic plays such as Moliere’s Tartuffe (1985) and Euripides’ Medea (2000)

She was appointed ‘Scots Makar’, a title also known as National Poet of Scotland, on January 19, 2011, succeeding Edwin Morgan. When the Scottish Parliament building was opened at Holyrood, Lochhead was invited to read Edwin Morgan’s magnificent inaugural poem for the occasion, Open the Doors, available online at: http://bit.ly/2CeVkAZ.

Characteristic of the generational change that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, Lochhead’s Mirror’s Song begins with the command to the reader and the poet’s persona and the mirror of the poem’s title: “Smash me looking-glass glass ... ” and ends with the line, “a woman giving birth to herself”.

It is as if in such an act of self-generation, and regeneration, the exemplary struggle enacted in the poem takes its place along with the work of all the poets we have encountered in these few essays, in the process of a nation giving birth to itself.