Dannie Abse

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	Photo: © Elsa Corbluth

Biography

Poet Dannie Abse was born on 22 September 1923 in Cardiff to Jewish parents. He studied Medicine in Wales and at King's College, London, qualifying as a doctor in 1950. His first collection of poetry, After Every Green Thing, was published in 1948, and he has continued to combine his careers as both a doctor (he was a specialist at the Central Medical Establishment chest clinic between 1954 and 1989) and writer, aspects of his life that, together with his Jewish background and Welsh nationality, are integral themes in his poetry.

Dannie Abse was Senior Fellow of the Humanities at Princeton University (1973-4), and President of the Poetry Society (1978-92). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, Fellow of the Welsh Academy of Letters in 1992 (President 1995-), Honorary Fellow at the University of Wales College of Medicine (1999), and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universities of Wales (1989) and Glamorgan (1997). He was given a Cholmondeley Award in 1985.

His poetry collections include Selected Poems (1970), winner of an Arts Council of Wales Literature Award; Pythagoras (1979); Way Out in the Centre (1981); Ask the Bloody Horse (1986); and White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1988 (1989). He has also published fiction, including Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve (1954) and O. Jones, O. Jones (1970), as well as non-fiction and plays, and he has edited many poetry anthologies. Goodbye, Twentieth Century: An Autobiography (2001), includes and updates his first volume of autobiography, A Poet in the Family (1974). His most recent novel, The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (2002), is set in 1950s London.  The Two Roads Taken: A Prose Miscellany was published in 2003.

Dannie Abse was married to the late Joan Mercer, art historian, with whom he edited two books, Voices in the Gallery: Poems and Pictures (1986) and The Music Lover's Literary Companion (1988).

His latest book of memoir, The Presence (2007), is a celebratory portrait of his 50-year marriage. It won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award in 2008. New Selected Poems (2009) has been published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of his first collection After Every Green Thing.

In 2009, he won the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Autobiography, Drama, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry

Bibliography

After Every Green Thing   Hutchinson, 1948

Walking Under Water   Hutchinson, 1952

Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve   Hutchinson, 1954

Fire in Heaven   Hutchinson, 1956

Some Corner of an English Field   Hutchinson, 1956

Mavericks: An Anthology   (editor with Howard Sergeant)   Editions Poetry and Poverty, 1957

Tenants of the House: Poems 1951-1956   Hutchinson, 1957

Poems, Golders Green   Hutchinson, 1962

Poems! Dannie Abse: A Selection   Vista, 1963

Modern European Verse   (editor)   Vista, 1964

Medicine on Trial   Aldus, 1967

Three Questor Plays   Scorpion, 1967

A Small Desperation   Hutchinson, 1968

Demo   Sceptre, 1969

O. Jones, O. Jones   Hutchinson, 1970

Selected Poems   Hutchinson, 1970

Modern Poets in Focus 1   (editor)   Corgi, 1971

Modern Poets in Focus 3   (editor)   Corgi, 1971

Thirteen Poets   (editor)   Poetry Book Society, 1972

Funland and Other Poems   Hutchinson, 1973

Modern Poets in Focus 5   (editor)   Corgi, 1973

The Dogs of Pavlov   Vallantine, M., 1973

A Poet in the Family   Hutchinson, 1974

Penguin Modern Poets 26   (Dannie Abse, D. J. Enright and Michael Longley)   Penguin, 1975

Collected Poems 1948-1976   Hutchinson, 1977

More Words   BBC, 1977

My Medical School   Robson, 1978

Pythagoras   Hutchinson, 1979

Way Out in the Centre   Hutchinson, 1981

A Strong Dose of Myself   Hutchinson, 1983

Doctors and Patients   (editor)   Oxford University Press, 1984

Ask the Bloody Horse   Hutchinson, 1986

Journals From the Ant Heap   Hutchinson, 1986

Voices in the Gallery: Poems and Pictures   (editor with Joan Abse)   Tate Gallery, 1986

The Music Lover's Literary Companion   (editor with Joan Abse)   Robson, 1988

The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry   (editor)   Hutchinson, 1989

White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1988   Hutchinson, 1989

People   (contributor)   National Language Unit of Wales, 1990

Remembrance of Crimes Past: Poems 1986-1989   Hutchinson, 1990

The View from Row G: Three Plays   Seren, 1990

There Was A Young Man From Cardiff   Hutchinson, 1991

Intermittent Journals   Seren, 1994

On the Evening Road   Hutchinson, 1994

Selected Poems   Penguin, 1994

The Gregory Anthology 1991-1993   (editor with A. Stevenson)   Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994

Twentieth-Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry   (editor)   Seren, 1997

Welsh Retrospective   Seren, 1997

Arcadia, One Mile   Hutchinson, 1998

Encounters   Hearing Eye, 2001

Goodbye, Twentieth Century: An Autobiography   Pimlico, 2001

New and Collected Poems   Hutchinson, 2002

The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas   Robson, 2002

The Two Roads Taken: A Prose Miscellany   Enitharmon, 2003

Running Late   Hutchinson, 2006

100 Great Poems of Love and Lust: Homage to Eros   (compiler and editor)   Robson, 2007

The Presence   Hutchinson, 2007

New Selected Poems   Hutchinson, 2009

Read about books by Dannie Abse at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Dannie Abse at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1960   Charles Henry Foyle Trust Award   (play)   House of Cowards

1970   Arts Council of Wales Literature Award   Selected Poems

1970   Jewish Chronicle Book Award   Selected Poems

1979   Arts Council of Wales Literature Award   Pythagoras

1985   Cholmondeley Award

2004   Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   New and Collected Poems

2008   Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year Award   The Presence

2009   Wilfred Owen Poetry Award

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Critical Perspective

Although Dannie Abse began in the 1950s as a poet disenchanted with the Movement orthodoxies then prevalent, and influenced by the example of Dylan Thomas, in the end his large body of work, in its rational clarity, is closer to Movement virtues than to Thomas's dithyrambics. He is warmer, more human than the Movement poets, though. His lifetime's work as a doctor has given him a grounding in human frailty and reality that many poets lack. Jewish matters often inform his poems and he sometimes uses Biblical parable or folk tale or at least their cadences, as in the early poem 'Song for Dov Shamir':

'Praying is another way of singing.
You plant in the tree the soul of lemons.
You plant in the gardens the spirit of roses.'

Wales, his life as a doctor, suburban life in north London - all come under his ruminative gaze. He likes to contrast the mores of Soho where he worked with Golders Green where he lives:

'It's a nice clean, quiet, religious place.
For my part, now and then, I want to scream:
Thus, by my neighbours, am considered odd.
...
It's a nice, loud, dirty, irreligious place.
For my part, now and then, I want to scream:
Thus, by Soho friends, am considered odd.'
('Odd')

His work as a doctor specialising in chest ailments informs both poems about direct medical experiences and about science generally. His attitude could be summed up as: science is good but is not to be trusted; art is good but is not to be trusted. In 'The Pathology of Colours' he says:

'I know the colour rose, and it is lovely,
But not when it ripens in a tumour.'

He makes an emblem of the white coat for the scientist/doctor and the purple coat for the poet. This concept is so important for him that, besides furnishing a poem, 'White Coat, Purple Coat', is the title of his Collected Poems White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1989 (1989): 'but in the white a man will freeze / and in the purple burn' ('Son of Pythagoras').'

But the benefits of medicine and intellectual elan of science are not scorned:

'Today, an x-ray on this oblong light
Clear that was not clear. No pneumothorax,
No deforming thoracoplasty. No flaw.
The patient nods, accepts it as his right.'
('Tuberculosis')

In 'Letter to Alex Comfort' he celebrates the bold pioneers of science and medicine, from Archimedes to Koch and Ehrlich:

'That Greek one, then, is my hero who watched the bath water
Rise above his navel, and rushed out naked, 'I found it,
I found it' into the street in all his shining and forgot
That others would only stare at his genitals.
What laughter!'
('Letter to Alex Comfort')

Dannie Abse's White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948-1989 were published in 1989, since when there have been two new collections, Remembrance of Crimes Past (1990) and On the Evening Road (1994).
Over time his preoccupations with Jewish matters has increased. Remembrance of Crimes Past has 'White Balloon - 'Dear Love, Auschwitz made me / more of a Jew than Moses ever did...' - and On the Evening Road has a poem cleverly exploring the two poles of the Jewish story through the medium 'Of Two Languages':

'Say now in Yiddish:
"Exile, Pogrom, Wanderer. Holocaust".
Say now in Hebrew:
"Blessed Art Thou O Lord".'

Peter Forbes, 2001

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Hutchinson Books Ltd Random House UK Ltd 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road London  SW1V 2SA England Tel: +44 (0)20 7840 8400 Fax: +44 (0)20 7932 0761 http://www.randomhouse.co.uk

Agent United Agents 12-26 Lexington Street London  W1F 0LE England Tel: +44 (0)20 3214 0800 Fax: +44 (0)20 3214 0801 E-mail: info@unitedagents.co.uk http://www.unitedagents.co.uk

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