Douglas Dunn & Oliver Reynolds - "Love, loss, candour and craft" April 2, 2011

Douglas Dunn is a grand old man of Scottish letters. Perhaps best known for his deeply moving collection Elegies, about the loss of his first wife, which was hailed as perhaps the greatest work of poetic mourning since Tennyson’s In Memoriam. He has written over a dozen collections, edited numerous anthologies, and published essays, translations, plays and works of fiction. He is on record as saying that good poetry depends upon the exposure of he heart – with no holding back. That said he still manages to celebrate domestic comforts, politics and the joys of music – somehow always asserting that “life is the best thing that can happen to us". He has won numerous prizes and awards including an Eric Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, holds no less than three honorary doctorates and was given an OBE for services to literature.

Oliver Reynolds was born in Cardiff in 1957. He studied drama at Hull University and returned to Wales to work in the theatre but soon settled on poetry as his chosen medium. He is the author of five collections. His first collection saw him celebrated as one of the ‘Martian’ poets of the 1980s and he won the Arvon Prize in 1985. There followed another three collections and then a silence of eleven years, during which time he has lived in London. He is perhaps one of our most neglected and overlooked of poets. This is a great shame because his work is beautifully wrought, witty and formally varied, ranging from intricate rhymes to free verse, aphoristic notes, prose poems and nonsense pieces. There are reflections on words and language too, but the core old his work lies in his sensuous love poems that chart the growth and passing of relationships.
Join us then for an evening of love and loss, candour and craft as we welcome two more master poets for another On the Border event.

Official Website: http://www.poetryontheborder.org/