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“... Driving along the B 1248 We pass such villages as Wetwang, or North Grimston of descending Z-bends. The Wolds are rolling for our benefit; The long woods stride toward the eastern shore. Frost sparks refrigerated ploughland to A fan of silver ribs, good husbandry In straight lines, going downhill to a point, A misted earthen star, half-frost, half-ground ...”

“... Rotund and acrobatic tits explored Bud-studded branches on our tallest birch tree, A picture that came straight from her adored, Delightfully composed chinoiserie. My girl was four weeks dead before that first Green haunting of the leaves to come, thickening The senses with old hopes, an uncoerced Surrender to the story of the Spring. In summer, after dinner, we used to sit Together in our second floor’s green comfort, Allowing nature and her modern inwit Create an indoor dusk, a room like art ...”

“... A pressed fly, like a skeleton of gauze, Has waited here between page 98 And 99, in the story called ‘Bliss’, Since the summer of ’62, its date, Its last day in a trap of pages. Prose Fly, what can ‘Je ne parle pas français’ mean To you who died in Scotland, when I closed These two sweet pages you were crushed between? Here is a green bus-ticket for one week In May, my place-mark in ‘The Dill Pickle ...”

“... See, how this lady rises on her swing Encouraged by the brush of Fragonard, As light as love, as ruthless as the Czar, Who, from her height, looks down on everything. When on a canvas an oil-eye of blue Has tiny fissures, you can stand behind, Imagine time, observe, and condescend. Wink at, and spit on, those who are not you. Out of the eye of Christ, you might see God; Or, from your swing, see pastoral machines Romanticised, re-made as guillotines; Or, Goya’s captive, face a firing-squad; Or, Goya’s soldier, be condemned to hear Eternity in the museum of death – Your moment after triggering – and with The horror of aesthetics in your ears ...”

“... The Navy groaned through its traditions. Fats Domino sang ‘Blueberry Hill’; It came through a hatch from America. The mothballed minesweepers pretended to be A chorus line of the Western World, Young ladies fallen into disrepute. This dusk is that dusk, its perfect duplicate, Down to the four swans, an evening mist That turns the conifers to Western Blue ...”

“... its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable ...”

“... to try to place the Irish flower alongside Rosenberg’s poppy, and the desert flower of Keith Douglas’s ‘Desert Flowers’. It seems to me that Longley’s poetry arises from a Protestant conscience which takes satisfaction from the certainties of country life and the securities of domesticity. Rebelliously placing his faith in poetry itself, Mahon ...”

“... himself are mavericks, like Tony Harrison and (very implausibly) the Larkin who befriended Douglas Dunn, once his Scottish neighbour in Hull. He ignores the pair (both provincials, of course) whom Kenner singled out as the most honourable exceptions: Charles Tomlinson, who applauded William Soutar, and Basil Bunting, who befriended MacDiarmid. Yet ...”

“... up from history for a commission he received from the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull in 1983, Douglas Dunn has made him the narrator of his book-length poem The Donkey’s Ears. It’s been a long journey for Politovsky this time round as well: after leaving the poem for many years Dunn picked it up again in ...”

“... and the beauty of labour – lacking first-hand knowledge of the material they deal in. Douglas Dunn, impeccably proletarian and Left-inclining, once wrote memorably about a backstreet in Hull – but he, it turns out, is Scottish. And D.J. Enright’s vivid account of a working-class childhood, The Terrible Shears, is really more prose ...”

“... clucking and tutting,   Sighing or saying that it served her right, The bitch! However, Douglas Dunn’s heroine persuades the other women to laugh with her, and the lawyer men are taken with ‘her rugged aplomb’. This story was for the New Yorker. The second story, ‘Twin Sets and Pickle Forks’, is about a Scottish tea-room run by Miss ...”

“... the pulls and torsions of that question produces much of the verse of Heaney, Harrison and Dunn, but it also produces very different kinds of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ...”

“... Douglas Dunn’s Selected Poems includes the greater part of his published poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the widely acclaimed Elegies (1985). Terry Street and the two following volumes, The Happier Life and Love or Nothing, were well received as plain unvarnished poems of Northern suburbia: and now the inventory of working-class clothes, foods and pastimes has a certain period interest ...”

“... by someone studying a tour brochure in Henley. I do not recommend a dip in these tideless waters. Douglas Dunn, fortunately but tragically, is the absolute opposite of a vapid poet like Levi. Dunn’s elegies were written after the death of his wife, Lesley Balfour Dunn, in March ...”

“... the day ‘That only the very worst literature is foreign:/ That practically no life at all is.’ Douglas Dunn thinks that these earlier poems are not only Enright’s best, but that they ‘stand among the best poems of their time’. Part of their conviction derives from their direct engagement with political and social issues, so much more unignorable ...”