Noise of a Fly, The (Poetry)

- Blurb -

The Noise of a Fly is the first new collection from Douglas Dunn in sixteen years, and the first since he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013. It is a book brimming with a charming grumpiness: a quarrel with ageing, an impatience with youth, the grief of losing friends and colleagues - poems that are handled with the dexterous humour and the self-mockery of a knowing curmudgeon. But the book looks outward in equal measure: at Scottish independence, British politics, international refugees, and reflects movingly on what it is to be an ageing member of society.For decades, Douglas Dunn has been a major figure in British poetry. Elegies won the first ever Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1985, pipping Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to the prize: it has since become a modern classic and is still in print in our typographic front list look today. Before then, Douglas Dunn had shot to fame with Terry Street (1969), a brilliant and affectionate portrait of life in the working-class terraces of Hull, in the city where he once worked as an apprentice librarian to Philip Larkin.