Book reviews: poetry by Rachel McCrum and Douglas Dunn

Reviewing these two books together might seem a bit like the old 'compare and contrast' exercises we were given in school. On the surface the contrast could not be greater. Douglas Dunn is a venerable figure, winner of the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 2013, and The Noise of a Fly is his first collection in 16 years. Previous works, such as St Kilda's Parliament and Elegies are, I would argue, already canonical; lines of his work have even been beamed on to Castle Rock by the Edinburgh City of Literature.

Rachel McCrum’s book, The First Blast To Awaken Women Degenerate, is a debut, from a writer who came to prominence through the spoken word scene as part of the Rally & Broad events, although she had already published two pamphlets with Stewed Rhubarb Press – The Glassblower Dances and Do Not Alight Here Again – and was the BBC Scotland Poet in Residence. But it would be a mistake to think comparing them would involve the wrought versus the edgy, the textual versus the sonorous, or the elegiac versus the political.

Let me start with a confession and a mea culpa. The performance poetry scene always left me cold. I never attended Rally & Broad, still being in recovery from my brief exposure to the 90s scene, which seemed to me mostly shouting about your hatred of capitalism and never putting two words together that hadn’t met before. Yet The First Blast To Awaken Women Degenerate seems to me a profoundly ink-fixed book. The works are not scripts to be performed; indeed one poem, “Take Me To Market, Mother Dear (a strategy of dissonance)” seems more like Ezra Pound than John Cooper Clarke in its bricolage of voices and found texts and the switchbacks between types from bold to italic. The whole collection manages to take the lyrical and whittle it into the political. “Across town the ancient dancer” has a vision of atomised communities that could easily sit beside Dunn’s collection Terry Street. Some of the poems are formally innovative: in particular I liked the “Problems to Sharpen the Young” sequence, which takes a school-marmy tone to make everything more, and not less, problematic. Time and again there are snatches that stick in the memory – “the ossuary absent of bones, the fingers of the setting sun”; “I am unbuilding a house”; the lovely – and very wry – simile of “a tilting clatter of pre-teen boys / football boots clicking like high heels” (and notice the subtle little alliterations throughout those lines). There is a great deal of won humour and wonder here. If it does show the connection to being work for performance, it is in the propensity for list poems. “La poupee” is especially, angrily, good; bringing to the fore the concern with sexual politics, but my favourite is “Joy”, a poem which cleverly puns between a given name and an abstract noun.

Douglas Dunn’s collection might seem, on the first reading, the more traditional. He has a gift for rhyme and assonance that recollects WH Auden; there is an occasional cheekiness that is more Lord Byron than Philip Larkin. The title comes from one of John Donne’s sermons – just as McCrum is riffing on the notorious (and often misunderstood) pamphlet of John Knox – and refers to a capacity for being distracting, of quiet noticing, while in awe of the inevitable. Although the opening poem, “Idleness”, a beautiful little quatrain, suggests a book of nostalgia and obituary (“The sigh of an exhausted garden-ghost / A poem trapped in an empty fountain pen”), what is more significant is the constant keeks of mischievous humour. Often this is a result of the technical accomplishment: “A Teacher’s Notes” begins with the witty “Forbid morbidity”, rhymes “phoney” and “epiphany” and slyly admonishes “And ’twixt and ’tween and o’er are obsolete”.

Douglas Dunn PIC: AGF s.r.l./REX/Shutterstock

Like McCrum’s collection there is a tendency towards lists – or litanies. In Dunn’s case it is the horticultural and the ornithological that tends to be predominant, although there are a number of references to clocks as well: telling, with what that pun might mean. Indeed, one half line is a direct reference to Auden’s unfortunately famous “Stop all the clocks”.

The huge virtuoso piece in the collection is a long and intricate piece, “English (a Scottish essay)” which must be one of the most significant works to emerge from the debates about nationality and nationalism after the 2014 referendum. Dunn writes of being “groomed to profess complexities of nation / In an amended tongue, while writing verse / In ancient cadences and noise, my voice / A site of rebel mimicry”.

There is more that connects these collections than I had imagined on receiving them. Both are capable of that truly astonishing thing, the genuine, non-cynical love poem. Both are politically antsy – if McCrum is more admonitory, Dunn is more minatory and quietly seething. Both have a strong sense of the granular haeccitas of things; how the specifics are what matter and that generalities tend to be absurdities.

*The First Blast To Awaken Women Degenerate, by Rachel McCrum is published by Freight Poetry, £9.99

*The Noise Of A Fly, by Douglas Dunn, is published by Faber & Faber, £14.99

*Rachel McCrum is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival next Sunday, 6.30pm and 27 August, 9pm. Douglas Dunn appears on 18 August, 3.45pm