James Fenton on Douglas Dunn

'Goodbye to All That?' from The Strength of Poetry (2001) by James Fenton:

There was a time when, given the belief that empire was an absurdity and 'all that was in the past', a poet like Douglas Dunn could write his 'Poem in Praise of the British' confident that his ironies were shared....One could say of it that it takes nothing seriously, is unshockable and untroubled. The past is this wonderful absurdity. the politicians of the Right are not to be feared. We are living in this wonderful afterglow, and all is well. One of the things one would not have guessed about Terry Street when it came out was that its author was Scottish. In fact, given that most of the poems in the book are about a working-class district in Hull, one might perhaps have supposed him English. 'A Poem in Praise of the British' was untypical of its volume, but not untypical of the way Dunn later wrote at times, when he wrote as if he were expressing himself in French, in an easygoing, dandyish way of which sometimes tempted him. But what is absolutely untypical of the later Dunn is the insouciance with which he treats the subject of empire. Within ten years, in the volume called Barbarians, which shows the influence of the hard revolutionary Left, you find a poem called 'Empires' which might alos have been written to remedy the defects in seriousness of the earlier one....Soldiers are no longer funny. Empire is no longer an amusing mystery. By now Dunn has begun to think of himself as a barbarian to idenitfy with the victims of empire. And this phase gives way to a further phase in which, to a great extent, his Scottishness becomes his subject matter. He returns to his roots.

'A Poem in Praise of the British' (quoted in the above essay) from Terry Street (1969) by Douglas Dunn:

The regiments of dumb gunners go to bed early.
The soldiers, sleepy after running up and down
The private British Army meadows,
Clean the daisies off their mammoth boots.
The general goes pink in his bath reading
Lives of the Great Croquet Players.
At Aldershot, beside foot-stamping squares,
Young officers drink tea and touch their toes.

Heavy rain everywhere washes up the bones of British
Where did all that power come from, the wish
To be inert, but rich and strong, to have too much?
Where does glory come from, and when it's gone
Why are old soldiers sour and the banks empty?
But how sweet is the weakness after Empire
In the garden of a flat, safe country shire,
Watching the beauty of the random, spare, superfluous,

Drifting as if in sleep to the ranks of memorialists
That wait like cabs to take us off down easy street,
To the redcoat armies, and the flags and treaties
In the marvellous archives, preserved like leaves in books.
The archivist wears a sword and clipped moustache.
He files our memories, more precious than light,
To be of easy access to politicians of the Right,
Who are now sleeping, like undertakers on black cushions.