Wreck of the Fathership
Wreck of the Fathership Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll…
Specifikacia Wreck of the Fathership
Wreck of the Fathership
Being appointed Dundee Makar (or City Laureate) implied that Bill Herbert might settle into middle age. Then within six months his much-loved father died, and that civic idyll was thrown into crisis. He rented a flat overlooking Broughty Ferry harbour to write about his home town in both its native tongues.
This is his Dundonian Book of the Dead, in which he explores both his own grief and the encroachment of a new intolerance. 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. 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