ABOUT D.M. BLACK

D.M. Black is a Scottish poet, born in South Africa in 1941, brought up in Scotland from 1950.  He was most active as a poet in the 60s and 70s.  His work at that time was distinctive in being predominantly narrative, initially under the influence of the Belgian poet Henri Michaux, later influenced by Samuel Beckett and W.H. Auden. Initially, his narratives were usually quite short and somewhat surrealist; in the 70s they became longer, sometimes up to 30 pages in length, and very much more psychological.  For three of these long poems he used a modified classical metre, hendecasyllabics, previously only used for short and usually romantic pieces. He is fond of saying that he has probably written more hendecasyllabics than any poet in recorded history!

These poems had a brief burst of popularity in the late 60s, when Black's work was included in the well-known Penguin Modern Poets series (no 11).  Later collections were not widely distributed, but were highly praised by discerning critics:  

                     Of The Happy Crow (1974) Philip Hobsbaum wrote: "David Black has established himself among the modern masters of poetry."  

                     Of Gravitations (1979) Ewart Milne wrote: "He walks in his own style like a leopard among rocks, surefooted, agile and muscularly balanced... those who like reading exciting tales, whether they think they like poetry or not, should read him".

                     And of the same collection, Anne Stevenson wrote:  "Its themes of doubt and perplexity are handled with marvellous skill by a poet whose gifts, both as a writer and as an observer of human kind, are remarkable and enduring".

                     Andrew Greig linked Black with Ed Dorn and Edwin Morgan as writers of "persona narrative" - they are all (he wrote in 1981) "a sheer pleasure to read, have a serious (though never solemn) aspect, and for me represent the most interesting movement in British-American poetry today".

After 1980 Black published little poetry for many years.  His Collected Poems 1964-87 appeared from Polygon in 1991.  In the 1990s he published mainly translations, in particular of Goethe, including (homage from one narrative poet to another!) Goethe's long erotic narrative poem, Das Tagebuch (The Diary). Many of these, including that one, appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation.  

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