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W. N. HerbertW. N. Herbert
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Bibliography |
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Critical perspective
BiographyW. N. Herbert was born in 1961 in Dundee, Scotland and was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. His doctorate on the work of Hugh MacDiarmid was published as To Circumjack MacDiarmid (1992). He was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at Newcastle and Durham Universities from 1994 to 1996, and has also held residencies in Dumfries and Galloway (1993) and Moray Libraries (1993-4), as well as for the Cumbria Arts' Skylines education project in 1997 and the Wordsworth Trust's Dove Cottage in Grasmere (1997-8). In 1989, he launched the Scottish poetry magazine Gairfish with Richard Price.
He has recently edited and contributed to A Balkan Exchange (2007) and co-translated the Poems of Gaarrive with Martin Orwin (2008).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Criticism, Poetry
BibliographySterts and Stobies: Poems in Scots Obog Books, 1985 Sharawaggi: Poems in Scots Polygon, 1990 Anither Music Vennel Press, 1991 Duende: a Dundee Anthology (editor) Gairfish, 1991 Dundee Doldrums Galliard, 1991 The Landfish W.N.Herbert, 1991 Shibbo-lithos (editor) Gairfish, 1992 The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1992 The McAvantgarde (editor) Gairfish, 1992 To Circumjack MacDiarmid Oxford University Press, 1992 Poetry with an Edge (contributor) Bloodaxe, 1993 The Liberty Tree (editor) Gairfish, 1993 The New Poetry (contributor) Bloodaxe, 1993 Contraflow on the Super Highway (editor) Southfields Press/Gairfish, 1994 Dream State: the New Scottish Poets (contributor) Polygon, 1994 Forked Tongue Bloodaxe, 1994 The Testament of the Reverend Thomas Dick Arc, 1994 Cabaret McGonagall Bloodaxe, 1996 New Scottish Writing: Soho Square VII (contributor) Bloomsbury, 1996 The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (contributor) Picador, 1998 The Laurelude Bloodaxe, 1998 The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (contributor) Viking, 1998 New Blood (contributor) Bloodaxe, 1999 Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry Bloodaxe, 2000 The Forward Anthology of Poems of the Decade (contributor) Forward, 2001 The Big Bumper Book of Troy Bloodaxe, 2002 Bad Shaman Blues Bloodaxe, 2006 A Balkan Exchange (editor and contributor) Arc, 2007 Poems/Gaarrive (translator with Martin Orwin) Enitharmon, 2008
Prizes and awards1994 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award (shortlist) Forked Tongue 1994 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Forked Tongue 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) Forked Tongue 1996 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Cabaret McGonagall 1996 McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year (shortlist) Cabaret McGonagall 1996 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Cabaret McGonagall 1998 Scottish Arts Council Book Award The Laurelude
Critical Perspective
W. N. Herbert is a leading figure in the energetic renewal of Scottish poetry carried out by poets born between 1955 and 1965, a group which includes Carol Ann Duffy, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Robert Crawford. Crawford, who like Herbert is a scholar and critic as well as a poet, has been a frequent collaborator with Herbert – and the act of collaboration has been a significant one in Herbert’s career to date: books, music, public art and cross-arts projects have all resulted from Herbert’s vigorous advocacy of poetry in all imaginable contexts.
To grasp the nature of his work it is necessary both to read him as the author of individual poems and as a writer who seeks to shape Scottish (and English) literary culture on a scale which recalls two of his major inspirations, Hugh McDiarmid and Edwin Morgan. Herbert is a prolific poet of local intimacy and international scope, ranging widely in form and subject, as much at home with the politics of post-Soviet Russia as with the doings of the Broon family, (the characters of a national cartoon epic found in the deadly respectable pages of The Sunday Post, flagship of the Dundee publishers D.C. Thomson). Herbert is also a teacher, not as the survival strategy of the contemporary poet, though he understands it (‘Ye ken why verse is still romantic? / Ut peys nae wage’), but from conviction.
Herbert has made life difficult for himself in the English context by choosing to write partly in Scots – an act at once affirmative and provocative. He has stated that: ‘Scots is a language capable of doing more than English, capable of doing something different from English that criticises and, ultimately, extends English. That is the spirit in which I write Scots poetry.’ His is not the sclerotic, administered Scots of ‘style-sheeters’ but a promiscuous, gluttonous language that draws on extant vocabularies while also freely inventing new ones as required. Herbert’s Scots can encompass the modernist urban night-epic of Dundee Doldrums (1991), making a city often seen as quintessentially provincial into a forcing-house of the imagination. It can also extend and refresh the vernacular tradition of Burns and Fergusson, achieving effects of great delicacy, poignancy and lyric purity (paralleled by Jamie and Paterson) which seem beyond the reach of his English contemporaries, as in ‘Featherhood’ (Cabaret McGonagall, 1996):
'Sae licht the lives that laive us
The sense of tradition is not to be confused with piety, as the mixed tones of ‘The Third Corbie’ (Cabaret McGonagall) indicate. The bird not present in the famous border ballad ‘The Twa Corbies’ is turned into a comic but eerie (and far-from-passive) object of scrutiny. This poem is also Herbert’s reworking of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ – and in Herbert’s hands the play of imagination is anchored, often sombrely, in a tradition where the uncanny retains its power:
'I have seen the third corbie,
The ballad is a favourite form for Herbert. Its momentum serves his humour, whether dry or uproarious; he in turn lends the ballad the sense of being an especially public kind of poem by seeming to include the reader as a familiar in the discourse. This positional sense serves as an invitation to encounter material which may be comic and celebratory (‘Ode to Scotty’ from Cabaret McGonagall is a poem of praise to the Scottish engineer in Star Trek) but also thematically complex and heavily Scots in vocabulary. He also writes with brilliant light-footedness in Standard Habbie (Burns Metre), as in ‘Address to the English’ (The Laurelude, 1998). Herbert’s sense of audience is a kind of courtesy derived from the sense of art as both democratic property and unapologetically serious – a combination which, again, his English contemporaries have found difficult to sustain. In doing so Herbert fulfils his claim about the critical stimulus which Scots can both provide for English.
The same might be said of his appetite for large-scale works in a period where the short lyric remains normative. The title poem of The Laurelude is a 40-page recasting of Wordsworth’s The Prelude as the life of the comedian Stan Laurel, who was born on the edge of the Lake District, in Ulverston. This impossible-sounding project illustrates one of Herbert’s perennial interests, and an aspect of his originality. The engagement of high art with popular culture often risks humiliation for the former and sentimentality about the latter. Herbert is never to be heard sounding like a consumer. ‘The Beano Elegies’ (Forked Tongue, 1994) converts the innocence of childhood comics into a meditation on Scottishness and religious division:
'Behind these paper ancestors stands
Herbert is also able to rise to the occasion of more formal elegy, as in ‘A Lament for Billy MacKenzie’ (The Big Bumper Book of Troy, 2002). The tragedy of the great Dundonian popular singer, who killed himself and whose gift was in some sense his undoing, is made an occasion of public mourning, with a confidence that disposes of habitual ironies about the diminished role of poetry in contemporary life. The poem makes a powerful appeal to tradition; at the same time it opens a utopian possibility amid tragedy: that poetry might awake the civic sense in its audience and wrest the habit of emotional and cultural record from the grip of the merely sentimental:
'The stranger in our city’s voice is dead
Sean O’Brien, 2004
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