\u003cp\u003eBeing appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a ï¬at overlooking Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its native tongues. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. Personal and political roles collided as referenda for Scottish independence and EU membership, then the US elections, signalled that the post-war liberal value system was very much in crisis. This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His townâs deï¬ning modern disaster â the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands â becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down. But while patriarchy ï¬ounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedianâs eye to bear on both the cityâs and our societyâs efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastropheâs ï¬otsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is reï¬ected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax â poems which resist any stasis of the imagination. The crew of this latter-day Ship of Fools include Captain Beefheart, the cannibal clan of the Denï¬ends, and a lion, while the passenger list features the surrealist Leonora Carrington, various Jesuses, and the ghastly Imperator Trumpo. Its voyages to alternative futures and pasts echo those of Herbertâs merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Seniorâs later trade of precision engineer, it ï¬ts together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.\u003c/p\u003e
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