Book award to Scottish poet

Press, 11 February 1986, Page 21

Book award to Scottish poet

From

JOHN EGAN

in London

Britain’s most lucrative prize — the Whitbread Book of the Year — has been awarded to an obscure Scottish poet for a short collection of verse, "Elegies,” written while in mourning for his wife.

Douglas Dunn, who was born in Scotland in 1942 and worked for much of his life as a librarian, lost his wife, Lesley, in 1981 as a result of cancer. After her death he began to write the series of extremely personal and private poems describing his bereavement The Whitbread award, at $46,182, is one of the largest prizes for literature in the English speaking world, and now overtakes the much publicised Booker award at $39,585, which last year went to the New Zealand novelist, Keri Hulme, for “The Bone People.” Whitbread, a beer manufacturing company, in offering more than $6OOO above the Booker award,, may well be initiating a literary award war, for it is an invitation to Booker to cap its> offer next year. /

The big prizes on the British literary scene go most frequently to the novel. In awarding Dunn for “Elegies,” Whitbread will have given an enormous boost to poetry writing and publishing. Dunn’s work is quiet, accessible, and predominantly domestic in theme. He describes with stark simplicity his reaction to the news of his wife’s fatal illness:

No image, no straw to support

me— nothing To hear or see. No leaves rus-

tling in sunlight Only the mind sliding against

events And the antiseptic whiff of destiny.

Many of the poems attempt to recollect moments of time associated with his wife against the background of grief. A seemingly depressive subject for a prizewinning book, yet the universal reaction of the critics, who have found it “life-enhancing” and “deeply moving,” has been enthusiastic.

Copyright — London Observer Service.