Poem Of The Week: Modern Love By Douglas Dunn

Modern Love

It is summer, and we are in a house
That is not ours, sitting at a table
Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,
The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull
To sleep the under-tens and invalids,
The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,
The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.
Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better
Happiness than this, not much to show for love
Than how we are, or how this evening is,
Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive
In a domestic love, seemingly alone,
All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight,
Looking forward to a visit from the cat.

Scots poet Douglas Dunn was a student at the University of Hull during the tenure of Philip Larkin as Chief Librarian. Coming to know, and to some extent encourage, his young protégé, the older poet was instrumental in bringing Dunn to public notice. And whilst Dunn’s work, and especially his renowned first collection, Terry Street, bears the marks of a distinct and original pen, the poems are shadowed, if not by Larkin’s guiding hand, then by tonal and stylistic similarities.

Relatively simple pieces of acute observation, of the scratch and sniff of direct experience, Dunn’s poems deliver irony in detachment; irony because the detached view contradicts, by virtue of proximity, the people and the urban landscape under scrutiny. Simple, but beautifully wrought, the poems effect an unblinkered examination of the ordinary, in this instance of the Hull working classes of the late 1960s and 70s, directly and without condescension, in the manner of Larkin’s own ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.

‘Modern Love’ – even the title is infused with irony – foreshortens the narrator’s world view to a rented box in a city’s terraced street. Unprepossessing and threadbare, digs as charmless as the former domicile of ‘Mr Bleaney’, the sonnet, whose changeful metre and rhythm mirror a low-key mooch, is also seamed with the kind of metaphor that perfectly describes a peeling and underfed tableau. For this is a scene of twenty watt light bulbs and the single-bar electric fire.

In the welcome unpeopled silence, whose noises-off are lulled by absence and by the early evening’s narcosis, the narrator finds a semblance of comfort in the irony of the limited horizon. For what sustains, in the thin domestic quotidian, is the presence of love, and the half-hearted promise of a ‘visit from the cat’.

'Modern Love' is taken from The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, Edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion, published by Penguin Books (1982).