W.N. Herbert
(at the Tomb of the
Fragrant Concubine, Kashgar, Xinjian Province, Autumn 2006)
was born in Dundee in 1961, and educated there and at
Brasenose College, Oxford, where he did a BA in English
Literature and then a D.Phil. His thesis was published as
To Circumjack MacDiarmid (OUP, 1992). He mainly
writes poetry in Scots and English, but a number of
essays and short stories have also been published.
His latest book is
Bad Shaman Blues (Bloodaxe, 2006). He reviews for, among others, Poetry London and Scotland on Sunday.
He has held a series of
residencies in Dumfries & Galloway and in Morayshire.
He was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the Universities
of Newcastle and Durham (1994-96), Writer in Residence on
Cumbria Arts in Education Skylines project (1997), and
Writing Fellow for the
Wordsworth Trust in
Grasmere (1998). From 1996 to 2002 he taught in the Department of Creative Writing at
Lancaster University
. He now holds a Chair in
Poetry and Creative Writing in the
School of English at Newcastle
University. In fact he grips all furniture rather tightly, as though
he were somehow conscious of the earth's hurtling movement through space.
He is the
occasional editor of the occasionally-updated poetry
webzine Franks Casket, which he designed for NU's School of
English. This features work by poets in the north of
England, whether undergraduate and postgraduate writers,
or published and up-and-coming poets from the region. He
lives in a disused lighthouse on the Tyne estuary where
he tries not to sink the ships.
Should you want still more
biographical info, plus hopeless literary lucubrations
and endless blabbings on about things dear to his heart,
there's an interview on the Poetry Kit site you might try out.
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His books
Pamphlets
Sterts and Stobies (with Robert Crawford), Obog,
1985
Severe Burns (with Robert Crawford and David
Kinloch), Obog, 1987
Other Tongues (with Meg Bateman, David Kinloch
and Angela McSeveney), Verse Publications, 1990
Dundee Doldrums, Galliard, 1991
Anither Music, Vennel, 1991
The Landfish, Duncan of Jordanstone, 1991
Poetry
Sharawaggi (written with Robert Crawford) Polygon,
1990
| The Testament of the Reverend
Thomas Dick,
Arc, 1993 
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This was going to be
called The Dick Poems, which wasn't
strictly accurate, but might've raised the
reviewers' eyebrows. Then it was going to be
called The Memory Hat, but no, he had to
call it The Please-Could-No-one- Notice-This
Testament (then Deryn Rees-Jones came out
with The Memory Tray anyway). Here's
stuff from the original blurb: 'Inspired by the
visions of the eponymous nineteenth century
Dundonian astronomer, who dreamed of a universe
where angels rubbed shoulders with flying
saucers, Herbert gives us a cosmic journey which
takes us by way of Buster
Keaton's nightmare world to places beyond the
stars where time ceases to exist and Orfeon, the
first robotic poet, reigns supreme...a wholly
original voice.'
Buy The
Testament
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| 'Hey Mr NewGen, can
we crank your sales up?' Well, alright. Worth
buying for the nude-from-the-neck-up photo on the
back. Twenty poets were selected to be South
Banked by Melvyn and ogled at by Vogue.
Guess who was twentieth on that list? In effect
the media focussed on the same half doz they
could remember from last time. But it marked the
beginning of acknowledging the Scots. This is
from the PBS essay 'I Tell a Lie': 'Herbert
speak with forked tongue. One strand wiggles back
to Blackness Primary and recites 'Yir heid's
daft/yir belly's saft/and yir bum is made o
leather'. The other coils round Brasenose
College and dreams of Marius the Epicurean. But I
don't want to choose between them; I want both
prongs of the fork. Aren't we continually hopping
registers like socially-challenged crickets? My
motto is 'And not Or.'
Buy Forked
Tongue
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Forked Tongue, Bloodaxe, 1994 
(PBS Recommendation, New
Generation title, shortlisted for the Saltire and
T.S. Eliot Prizes, won an SAC Book Award)
|
| Cabaret McGonagall, Bloodaxe,1996 
(Shortlisted for the
Forward and McVitie Prizes, won an SAC and a
Northern Arts Book Award)
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Beginning of the Big
Book Theory (if you're going to write in Scots
and English, if you're going to be Scottish but
live in England, if you're going to be scholarly
and a performer -- then you'd better do twice the
work). Lazy reviewers responded with the But You
Can Only Excel at One Thing Paradox: so Herbert
is allowed to be good at writing in Scots. The
blurb says: 'The verse veers from the Whitmanic
to Dunbar-like flytings, and the language lurches
from Scots to English through all half-way houses.
The result is a big bad anxious trip through the
Information Age with one of the most various of
contemporary poets.'
The Guardian says: 'A wierd mix of Desperate
Dan, MacDiarmid and Dostoevsky...'
Buy Cabaret
McGonagall
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| Just as people began
to think 'This Scots stuff isn't so bad after
all'; just as the Shortbread Cringe was being
flung to one side; at the very moment when a
cultural breakthrough was possible -- Herbert
writes an epic in English set in the Lake
District. Proof that he hadn't yet distinguished
between having a career
and simply careering. 'W.N. Herbert defies most
normal categorizations ...Omnivorousness is his
defining trait: everything, high or low, that he
encounters seems to be grist for his mill.'
Poetry Review
Buy The
Laurelude
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The Laurelude, Bloodaxe, 1998 
(PBS Recommendation, won
an SAC Book Award)
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'The Laurelude is an eclectic
meditation on language, nature and identity,
crackling with humour, intelligence, cussedness
and hallucination.'
PN Review |
| The
Big Bumper Book of Troy,
Bloodaxe, 2002 
(Longlisted for the SAC's Scottish Book of
the Year, and Shortlisted for the Saltire Award)
Buy The Big Bumper Book of
Troy
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While the literary
world gazes elsewhere, Herbert persists with his
theory of the long book, clearly painting himself
into the perfect corner. Helpful hint: always
attempt to distinguish between cult obscurity and
the plain overlooked variety before boarding the
obsessives' minibus. Fortunately his publisher
continues to say nice things about him. See below: 'The
northern word for hometown, ‘toon’,
flickers in meaning between ‘tune’ and
‘cartoon’. In Bill Herbert’s big
bumper book, the title toon is Troy: the
first lost home. Exiled to a lighthouse on the
River Tyne, the wily Scots maestro has written a
book in love with lost and difficult things.
Sometimes reflective, sometimes subversively
mischievous, he registers or rails against
displacement and resettlement, lamenting the
passing of relatives, cities, furniture, and the
odd lemur.' |
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A couple of the more polite
reviews:
'Herbert is perhaps the secret weapon of his
generation… Given the thematic and tonal range of his work, its
formal and linguistic ingenuity and the passion he brings to his
task, the obvious comparison is with the omni-poetic Scottish
laureate, Edwin Morgan. It is one that Herbert’s work can bear, and
Bad Shaman Blues, which is big enough for two or three conventional
volumes, offers samples of his full range.'
Sean O'Brien, The Sunday Times
'Herbert offers his most cheeky, moving, intricate and
revelatory volume to date…the humour, the invention, the precision,
the attention to form - comes together in one remarkable long poem,
'Rabotnik Fergussson'. It's bad form for a reviewer to announce a
future classic, but this poem - deft and daft, part Dante and part
Dandy - is the closest I've seen to a classic since Goodsir Smith
and MacDiarmid.'
S.B. Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
|
Bad Shaman Blues, Bloodaxe, 2006
(PBS Recommendation,
shortlisted for the Saltire Award and the T.S. Eliot
Prize)
Buy Bad
Shaman Blues
|
Critical/Editorial
To Circumjack MacDiarmid, Oxford University
Press, 1992
Contraflow on the Super Highway: An Informationist
Primer (ed. with Richard Price),
Gairfish/Southfields, 1994
| Strong
Words, Bloodaxe, 2000 (edited
with Matthew Hollis) 
'utterly compelling . . . Strong
Words brings together a diverse collection
of essential commentaries in a single volume.'
BBC Radio 3
'one turns to verse after reading
Strong Words with new energy,
inspiration and insight.'
Times Literary Supplement
'an erudite and sophisticated
book, a mosaic of the 20th century's stylistic
variety and formal ingenuity'
Scotland on Sunday
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It can't be
emphasised enough that if you've read this far
you should simply buy Strong
Words. Here's the blurb, see if that clinches
things: 'Poetry has never been so rigorous and
diverse, nor has its audience been so numerous
and engaged. Strong words? Not if the poets are
right. As Ezra Pound wrote: 'You would think
anyone wanting to know about poetry would go to
someone who knew something about it.' That's
exactly what Bloodaxe has done with this
judicious and comprehensive selection of British,
Irish and American manifestos by some of modern
poetry's finest practitioners.
Strong Words then brings the issues
fully up to date with over 30 specially
commissioned statements from contemporary
writers, amounting to a new overview of the
poetry being written at the start of the 21st
century.
For poets and readers, for critics, teachers
and students of creative writing and contemporary
poetry, this is essential reading. This landmark
book champions the continuing dialogue of these
voices, past and present, exploring the strongest
form that words can take: the poem.'
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BON: Book of the North (CD-ROM anthology),
New Writing North, 2001 Creative
Writing: A Workbook with Readings, edited by Linda Anderson
(Roultedge/OU, 2006) -- Herbert contributed the Poetry section, which is
due to appear as a separate volume (check back here for
progress).
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