Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. He rented a flat 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 defining 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 flounders 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 flotsam and jetsam, and the image of the overturned boat is reflected 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 Denfiends, 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 fits together a dynamic range of forms with an intense focus on the metamorphic and redemptive energies of language.
‘WN Herbert’s new book, The Wreck of the Fathership, is a series of studies in public disaster and private grief. Written while working as Dundee’s first Makar (official laureate) from 2013-18, the book cleverly and movingly folds together several overlapping narratives – the illness and death of the poet’s father, the referenda on Scottish independence and the EU, the election of Trump and Johnson, the sinking of the Mona lifeboat in 1959 and the long, slow shipwreck of the post-war consensus. It’s a hugely entertaining and inventive collection…’ – Andy Croft, Morning Star
‘In The Wreck of the Fathership, Herbert continues to astonish at the level of pure invention and in generosity of subject matter... In a short piece such as this it is impossible to do justice to a book so rich in invention and feeling... I trust that many readers will come to The Wreck of the Fathership, where they might find the profundity and even the solace this work of essential mourning offers.’ – David Hackbridge-Johnson, The High Window
'This wouldn’t be a Bill Herbert collection if it didn’t have lashings of satire and surreal, skewering humour...This is a poet who is keenly alive to the power, nuance and sound of language as a mutating, multivalent thing.' – Dzifa Benson, Magma [on The Wreck of the Fathership]
‘This collection has its roots firmly in Dundee, but calls upon themes, techniques and artists the world over, and overflows with hidden meanings and metaphysics. Herbert’s Fathership is an outpouring of emotion, especially of grief that threatens to drown the reader but steered by such poetic genius that no such disaster occurs. The turbulent contents are handled tightly, deftly.’ – Kai Durkin, DURA (Dundee University Review of the Arts)
'Although Herbert is praised for his linguistic elan and brio, code-switching between registersand dialects in his often ludic poetry, many of these poems are starkly poignant...The richness and multiplicity of this book can only be saluted.' – Richie McCaffery, Northwords Now
'...the collection is filled to bursting with a variety of poetic forms and styles that beg to be devoured through multiple readings and which present a veritable smӧrgåsbord of themes and content for any reader. The Wreck of the Fathership reveals Herbert at the height of his powers, but nowhere is this more evident than in the collection’s title-sequence...' – Matthew Macdonald, The Bottle Imp
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.
