Most Popular Books by Douglas Dunn

A wonderfully sustained narrative poem, full of the resonances and repercussions attendant on the end of an era, The Donkey''s Ears depicts life aboard a Russian flagship just before the battle of Tsushima, 1905. It purports to be written by E.S. Politovsky, a ship''s engineer addressing his wife in letters back home. Known as ''The Trafalgar of the East'', Tsushima (which, translated from the Japanese, means ''The Donkey''s Ears'' - a description of the twin peaks of the islands) was the biggest naval gun-battle in history. The action of the poem takes place before the battle. A vividly realized claustrophobia prevails. Life below and on deck is brilliantly detailed as is the sense of incipient doom; one man''s voice (domestic, particular, yearning for wife and home comforts) pitched against the inexorable onslaught of events.

A generous selection of poems from ''one of the most talented and interesting poets writing in English today'' (Robert Nye). In a distinguished poetic career, Douglas Dunn has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year. New Selected Poems 1964-1999 draws substantially upon the entire range of Dunn''s poetry, from Terry Street (1969) to The Year''s Afternoon (2000), and confirms his place ''among the finest of our poets'' (Melvin Bragg).

Terza rima, the form which Douglas Dunn calls ''Dante''s drum-kit'', supplies him with the structure for his own meditation on the afterlife, ''Disenchantments''. Other poems in this book are evidence of the author''s dazzling technical adroitness, which is matched, furthermore, by the ambitious range of themes he addresses. High seriousness and high jinks are equally at his command, and readers will welcome a collection which shows the poet of Elegies and Northlight performing with undiminished energy and stylishness.