I see the poet Douglas Dunn died this week. He was a compassionate craftsman whose work I have long admired; he worked to make his words shaped and memorable in a way that seems to have gone largely out of fashion, to judge from so much of what is now served up to us as poetry. I have already featured two poems from his moving collection ‘Elegies’, written in memory of his wife who died young (see weeks 39 and 469), but let me mark his passing with another from the same collection, that makes a valiant attempt, not to transcend grief, but to balance it with love and the memory of love.

Sandra’s Mobile

A constant artist, dedicated to
Curves, shapes, the pleasant shades, the feel of colour,
She did not care what shapes, what red, what blue,
Scorning the dull to ridicule the duller
With a disinterested, loyal eye.
So Sandra brought her this and taped it up –
Three seagulls from a white and indoor sky –
A gift of old artistic comradeship.
‘Blow on them, Love’. Those silent birds winged round
On thermals of my breath. On her last night,
Trying to stay awake, I saw love crowned
In tears and wooden birds and candlelight.
She did not wake again. To prove our love
Each gull, each gull, each gull turned into dove.

Douglas Dunn