Douglas Dunn, Scottish poet who turned grief into the Whitbread-winning Elegies, dies at 83
The poet, whose Faber career began with Terry Street in 1969, became known for the collection written after his first wife's death.
Douglas Dunn has died at 83, according to an obituary published by the Guardian. He is remembered chiefly for Elegies, a collection that channelled personal grief into poetry and won the Whitbread book of the year.
Dunn's first book, Terry Street, was published by Faber and Faber in 1969. The Guardian reports that Dunn described himself as overjoyed to join a publisher whose list already included T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn and Seamus Heaney, and recalled kissing his copies when they arrived.
He remained with Faber throughout his career. The Guardian notes that Dunn was sometimes placed alongside Heaney, Hughes, Larkin and Gunn as part of a notable generation of Faber poets, though his left-wing commitments and his attention to strict prosody distinguished him from Gunn's hedonism on one side and Heaney's broader popularity on the other.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
