The Wreck of the Fathership
Published on 22. October 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
232 pages
978-1-78037-524-3 (ISBN)
Description
Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a ?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 town's de?ning modern disaster - the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands - becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down.
But while patriarchy ?ounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian's eye to bear on both the city's and our society's efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe's ?otsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is re?ected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax - 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 Den?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 Herbert's merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior's later trade of precision engineer, it ?ts together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.
This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. His town's de?ning modern disaster - the loss in 1959 of the lifeboat Mona with all hands - becomes a symbol for a world turned upside down.
But while patriarchy ?ounders in a storm of its own undoing, his absurd alter ego, William McGonagall, brings his unique tragedian's eye to bear on both the city's and our society's efforts to right itself. The comic and the tragic become catastrophe's ?otsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is re?ected in the very structure of this book, with a keel-hauling of Dundee Doldrums for its climax - 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 Den?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 Herbert's merchantman father, while, in a manner that matches Bill Senior's later trade of precision engineer, it ?ts together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.
Reviews / Votes
A weird mix of Desperate Dan, MacDiarmid and Dostoyevsky... a rare and fantastic voice. -- Fiachra Gibbons * Guardian * This antithesis of the slim volume bubbles and seethes with wit and polysyllabic adventurousness. -- Edwin Morgan * The Scotsman * W.N. Herbert's poetic prescription is kill or cure. Herbert specialises in big, spine-burstingly various and formally eclectic books, in both Scots and English, that are always in the end unified by the energy, wit and intellectual adventurousness of their author... several books in one by a writer who should by rights count as several poets in one. -- Patrick McGuinness * The Guardian *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-524-3 (9781780375243)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
W.N. Herbert
The Wreck of the Fathership
E-Book
10/2020
Bloodaxe Books Ltd
€15.99
Available for download
Person
W.N. [Bill] Herbert is a highly versatile poet who writes both in English and Scots. Born in Dundee, he established his reputation with two English/Scots collections from Bloodaxe, Forked Tongue (1994) and Cabaret McGonagall (1996). These were followed by The Laurelude (1998), The Big Bumper Book of Troy (2002), Bad Shaman Blues (2006), Omnesia (2013) and The Wreck of the Fathership (2020). He has also published a critical study, To Circumjack MacDiarmid (OUP, 1992) drawn from his PhD research. His practical guide Writing Poetry was published by Routledge in 2010. He co-edited Strong Words: modern poets on modern poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) with Matthew Hollis, and Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2012) with Yang Lian. Bill Herbert is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and lives in a lighthouse overlooking the River Tyne at North Shields. He was Dundee's inaugural Makar from 2013 to 2018. Twice shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, his collections have also been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, McVities Prize, Saltire Awards and Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Four are Poetry Book Society Recommendations. In 2014 he was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize for his poetry, and an honorary doctorate from Dundee University. In 2015 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Content
13 Fathership Glosa
Good Makar
16 Cuttle?sh Bone
17 Night?shing
20 Broughty Ferry Beach: a renga
23 Balgay Hill
24 Blackness Caganer
25 Ghost Bowling
26 The Dundee Eve
28 Clouds at Night
30 Tay Nocturne
31 The Road Bridge
32 The Three Flies
34 Tay Lightning
36 Beach Terrace
36 i 'The swans glow grey in the night harbour'
36 ii 'Woken by a ghost helicopter'
37 iii 'Swans in the smirr'
37 iv 'Through some error when I wake up'
38 v 'The occasion of a death'
38 vi 'The buildings in the river's re?ection'
39 vii 'The wind's inventing whiteness again'
39 viii 'Why do we think of them at all, the dead'
40 The Continuity
41 June Dolphin
42 Kafka Eskimo
44 Rain Habbies
45 Burns' Night Impromptu
46 Physic
47 Bregus
49 Salary
50 The Swans at Broughty Ferry Beach
52 Sunday Morning Improv
55 The Wreck of the Javanese Princess
Algos
59 The Tortoise
61 Kalighat
63 Ganesh is Reading
64 The Losers' Table
65 Four Songs in the Guangling Style, and a Signature
65 i 'Wine Madness'
65 ii 'Wild Geese on a Sandy River Bank'
65 iii 'Confucius after the Death of his Favourite Student'
66 iv 'The Woodcutter's Song'
66 v 'Three Day Monk'
67 Nanjing Nightboat
68 The Two Haircuts
70 An Exotic Dream of Leonora Carrington
71 Teatro Orfeon
74 Keaton in Space
75 Lion in Sidecar
76 Mother Goo
79 The Fathership
Jesus Mary and Jetsam 1
82 Verbotentotentanz, i 'At ?rst, owing to the absence'
83 A Jesus of the Moon
84 Emmaus, 1997
85 A Jesus of the Mammoths
87 The Muriels
89 A Jesus of the Beetles
91 The Lost Poem
92 Verbotentotentanz, ii 'Meh skeleton twin'
The Wreck of the Fathership
95 i 'My father was never old'
95 Boat
96 iii 'The yellow man was doomed and knew it'
97 The Assembling of the Crew
98 v 'He held up his hand and we watched it tremble'
98 The Last Voyage
100 Hopkinsian 1
101 viii 'Eating sibling-quick, too socially'
102 The Discovery
104 Hopkinsian 2
105 xi 'He approached it methodically as though'
105 The Telling of the Wives
106 Hopkinsian 3
107 xiv 'My father's hand was larger of palm than mine'
108 The Report
109 Hopkinsian 4
110 xvii 'I remember the nurse saying 'Goodbye'
110 The Burning of the Mona
112 xix 'I keep seeing them wrestle you into'
112 xx 'Grant them peace, Patron of the sea'
Dundee Doldrums
115 23rd Doldrum Sailors' Graveyard
116 24th Doldrum 'Thi Toun as thi homunculus o us'
117 25th Doldrum 'Hunkirt wee man in blae skeh blue'
118 26th Doldrum 'When the ghaists o thi dinged doon'
119 27th Doldrum 'Tae loup intae nithin'
120 28th Doldrum 'Fellini ?ss oan thi Nummer 73'
121 29th Doldrum The Fireman's Daughter
122 30th Doldrum Snugs
123 31st Doldrum Cloud City
Executive Quatrains/Captain my Captain
126 1 inaugural rain/'In an attempt to circumvent terrible times'
127 2 the misrule/'Language you were always going to tell us'
128 3 a gowfbaa welcomes a bawbag tae balmoral/'What is it like this to imagine someone'
129 4 if in doubt, bomb/'To listen as ekphrasis is an act of praise'
130 5 strait is the visit/'The high desert for your ocean ?oor'
132 6 golfo de la empatia/'You knew from the inside of childhood'
133 7 der totentango/'The mess of ages has got into the messages'
134 8 sonetto per trumpo solo/'Caged in renegado cabin'
135 9 memento aurantium/'The great moment keeps passing'
Jesus Mary and Jetsam 2
138 Verbotentotentanz, iii 'It's braa when ye're deid'
140 Helen in the Bardo
144 On Napkins
146 The Municipal Labyrinth
147 On Cutlery
149 Letter to Cath Jenkins
151 On Brown Paper Bags
153 Verbotentotentanz, iv 'This thing you're in'
155 Death Wullie
Nostos
159 Cold City
160 The Sleepers
161 Byron's Mask
161 Follow Me
162 Fish-?ght at the Basilica Cisterns
163 The Dream of the Airport
164 Pagomenos
166 Portokali
167 Zone
168 How to Drink Ellenikos Kafes in Emprosneros
169 Komboloi
171 Maroudiana
173 Whose English Is It Anyway?
Bad Makar
176 Tyne Valley Section
180 North of the Book
182 The Calotype
183 To a Ploughman
184 The Parliaments of Birds
186 Showing Sharon Olds the Carcasses in St Andrews
187 Kirsty Wark on Broughty Ferry Beach, Or, An Indy Ref Ode
189 Explaining Irn Bru to the English
190 The Farewell to Jim Murphy (et al)
192 To a Rat
194 Bad Makar McGonagalliana
194 i The Resurrection of William McGonagall
194 ii McGonagall and the Burns Statue
195 iii McGonagall as a Dog
195 iv McGonagall and the Baxter Park Pavilion
196 v Ode tae Yet Anither Dundee Railway Station
197 vi Address to the Girders
197 vii Broughty Ferry Blackout
198 viii Address to the Dundee V&A
201 Ode to the USS Discovery (Season One)
203 The Couthier
204 Undeed
206 Mastercannibal
209 Owed to Groucho's
210 Remains of Doggerland
212 Rogues Reparcelled
214 The Fall of Brexitopolis
216 Gunlandia
218 The Nine Trades Welcome You to the City of Refuge
220 Il Futuro
222 Dirt Bath
225 The Giantess
229 Notes
Good Makar
16 Cuttle?sh Bone
17 Night?shing
20 Broughty Ferry Beach: a renga
23 Balgay Hill
24 Blackness Caganer
25 Ghost Bowling
26 The Dundee Eve
28 Clouds at Night
30 Tay Nocturne
31 The Road Bridge
32 The Three Flies
34 Tay Lightning
36 Beach Terrace
36 i 'The swans glow grey in the night harbour'
36 ii 'Woken by a ghost helicopter'
37 iii 'Swans in the smirr'
37 iv 'Through some error when I wake up'
38 v 'The occasion of a death'
38 vi 'The buildings in the river's re?ection'
39 vii 'The wind's inventing whiteness again'
39 viii 'Why do we think of them at all, the dead'
40 The Continuity
41 June Dolphin
42 Kafka Eskimo
44 Rain Habbies
45 Burns' Night Impromptu
46 Physic
47 Bregus
49 Salary
50 The Swans at Broughty Ferry Beach
52 Sunday Morning Improv
55 The Wreck of the Javanese Princess
Algos
59 The Tortoise
61 Kalighat
63 Ganesh is Reading
64 The Losers' Table
65 Four Songs in the Guangling Style, and a Signature
65 i 'Wine Madness'
65 ii 'Wild Geese on a Sandy River Bank'
65 iii 'Confucius after the Death of his Favourite Student'
66 iv 'The Woodcutter's Song'
66 v 'Three Day Monk'
67 Nanjing Nightboat
68 The Two Haircuts
70 An Exotic Dream of Leonora Carrington
71 Teatro Orfeon
74 Keaton in Space
75 Lion in Sidecar
76 Mother Goo
79 The Fathership
Jesus Mary and Jetsam 1
82 Verbotentotentanz, i 'At ?rst, owing to the absence'
83 A Jesus of the Moon
84 Emmaus, 1997
85 A Jesus of the Mammoths
87 The Muriels
89 A Jesus of the Beetles
91 The Lost Poem
92 Verbotentotentanz, ii 'Meh skeleton twin'
The Wreck of the Fathership
95 i 'My father was never old'
95 Boat
96 iii 'The yellow man was doomed and knew it'
97 The Assembling of the Crew
98 v 'He held up his hand and we watched it tremble'
98 The Last Voyage
100 Hopkinsian 1
101 viii 'Eating sibling-quick, too socially'
102 The Discovery
104 Hopkinsian 2
105 xi 'He approached it methodically as though'
105 The Telling of the Wives
106 Hopkinsian 3
107 xiv 'My father's hand was larger of palm than mine'
108 The Report
109 Hopkinsian 4
110 xvii 'I remember the nurse saying 'Goodbye'
110 The Burning of the Mona
112 xix 'I keep seeing them wrestle you into'
112 xx 'Grant them peace, Patron of the sea'
Dundee Doldrums
115 23rd Doldrum Sailors' Graveyard
116 24th Doldrum 'Thi Toun as thi homunculus o us'
117 25th Doldrum 'Hunkirt wee man in blae skeh blue'
118 26th Doldrum 'When the ghaists o thi dinged doon'
119 27th Doldrum 'Tae loup intae nithin'
120 28th Doldrum 'Fellini ?ss oan thi Nummer 73'
121 29th Doldrum The Fireman's Daughter
122 30th Doldrum Snugs
123 31st Doldrum Cloud City
Executive Quatrains/Captain my Captain
126 1 inaugural rain/'In an attempt to circumvent terrible times'
127 2 the misrule/'Language you were always going to tell us'
128 3 a gowfbaa welcomes a bawbag tae balmoral/'What is it like this to imagine someone'
129 4 if in doubt, bomb/'To listen as ekphrasis is an act of praise'
130 5 strait is the visit/'The high desert for your ocean ?oor'
132 6 golfo de la empatia/'You knew from the inside of childhood'
133 7 der totentango/'The mess of ages has got into the messages'
134 8 sonetto per trumpo solo/'Caged in renegado cabin'
135 9 memento aurantium/'The great moment keeps passing'
Jesus Mary and Jetsam 2
138 Verbotentotentanz, iii 'It's braa when ye're deid'
140 Helen in the Bardo
144 On Napkins
146 The Municipal Labyrinth
147 On Cutlery
149 Letter to Cath Jenkins
151 On Brown Paper Bags
153 Verbotentotentanz, iv 'This thing you're in'
155 Death Wullie
Nostos
159 Cold City
160 The Sleepers
161 Byron's Mask
161 Follow Me
162 Fish-?ght at the Basilica Cisterns
163 The Dream of the Airport
164 Pagomenos
166 Portokali
167 Zone
168 How to Drink Ellenikos Kafes in Emprosneros
169 Komboloi
171 Maroudiana
173 Whose English Is It Anyway?
Bad Makar
176 Tyne Valley Section
180 North of the Book
182 The Calotype
183 To a Ploughman
184 The Parliaments of Birds
186 Showing Sharon Olds the Carcasses in St Andrews
187 Kirsty Wark on Broughty Ferry Beach, Or, An Indy Ref Ode
189 Explaining Irn Bru to the English
190 The Farewell to Jim Murphy (et al)
192 To a Rat
194 Bad Makar McGonagalliana
194 i The Resurrection of William McGonagall
194 ii McGonagall and the Burns Statue
195 iii McGonagall as a Dog
195 iv McGonagall and the Baxter Park Pavilion
196 v Ode tae Yet Anither Dundee Railway Station
197 vi Address to the Girders
197 vii Broughty Ferry Blackout
198 viii Address to the Dundee V&A
201 Ode to the USS Discovery (Season One)
203 The Couthier
204 Undeed
206 Mastercannibal
209 Owed to Groucho's
210 Remains of Doggerland
212 Rogues Reparcelled
214 The Fall of Brexitopolis
216 Gunlandia
218 The Nine Trades Welcome You to the City of Refuge
220 Il Futuro
222 Dirt Bath
225 The Giantess
229 Notes