A Rumoured City by Douglas Dunn

A Rumoured City by Douglas Dunn

The rumoured city is elusive, a place of character and commerce, a bustling port in the north of England, but also an historic city with tree-lined roads, in recent years the home of many artists and writers. Not the mythical northern town of the fifties' novel, but a place of generous characters which – says Douglas Dunn – 'encourages an imaginative response to corners and details, sights and sounds, the effects of light and the seasons.' Introducing this anthology of new poets from Hull, Douglas Dunn describes their home as 'a town which by its nature recommends the plainly human.' An estuary city, Hull has a marginal, provisional, almost frontier quality.' For Philip Larkin, Hull is 'a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance.' In his foreword Larkin writes: 'A place cannot produce poems: it can only not prevent them, and Hull is good at that… These poems are not about Hull, yet is unseen in all of them, the permission of a town that lets you write.' If this anthology is any guide, what the rumoured city allows and nourishes is imaginative depth, diversity of style, and an openness to the world and to the resources of language. The poets included are: Peter Didsbury, Tony Flynn, Ian Gregson, T.F. Griffin, Douglas Houston, Margot K. Juby, Sean O'Brien, Tony Petch, Genny Rahtz and Frank Redpath. A Rumoured City was published at the same time as Peter Didsbury's first collection The Butchers of Hull.

Douglas Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, in 1942 and lived there until he married at the age of 22. After working as a librarian in Scotland and Akron, Ohio, he studied English at Hull University, graduating in 1969. He then worked for eighteen months in the university library after which, in 1971, he became a freelance writer. In 1982 he published his anthology A Rumoured City: new poets from Hull, and a pamphlet, Europa's Lover, with Bloodaxe. In 1991 he was appointed Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. As well as eleven collections of poetry, including Elegies (1985), The Year's Afternoon, The Donkey's Ears (both 2000), New Selected Poems 1964-2000 (2003) and The Noise of a Fly (2017), Douglas Dunn has written several radio and television plays, including Ploughman's Share and Scotsman by Moonlight. He has also edited various anthologies, including Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2006). Douglas Dunn has won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and has twice been awarded prizes by the Scottish Arts Council. In 1981 he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for St Kilda's Parliament. In January 1986 he was overall winner of the 1985 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his collection Elegies.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780906427415
ISBN 10	090642741X
Title	A Rumoured City
Author	Douglas Dunn
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Year published	1982-06-24
Number of pages	112
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable