Bugs

The 'bugs' of Antony Dunn's third collection appear variously as insects, spies and technological viruses; they constitute both the world we live in and a world of their own. These worlds are distinct but imbricated, and Dunn's poems explore the shifting and often surprising margin at which they meet. In 'Lepidopterist', a smitten lab worker can only frame his love for a colleague in the terms of his discipline, hoping that the right phrase will 'burst from his mouth / on unspeakable wings . . . but [he] can't pin it down'. Dunn's poetry is engaged in a similar struggle for articulation, caught between the strangeness of his vision and his commitment to conventional forms.
His poems are economical and uninterested in experimentation: the unrhymed couplet in which 'Lepidopterist' is written is particularly prevalent. His manner of address is clearly modulated and drawn from a closely observed quoitidian reality, as in the first stanza of 'First Kiss': 'In the garage, in your school skirt / leaning against the Mazda's rust-blue tail, / you were all green eyes'. But the stability of Dunn's form is complicated by the deliberate instability of his perception, as when these exacting details are unpicked in the final stanza: green eyes become blue, the Mazda becomes a Fiat, the kiss moves from the garage to the drive. For all its seeming lightness of touch, Dunn's poetry is very much alive to slips and lapses that shadow any attempt to describe the world.
Another entomological episode catches a crucial aspect of Dunn's method in 'Ichneumon Wasp'. The poem addresses Darwin's doubt that God would have created Ichneumonidae, a species of wasp whose larvae grow inside the living bodies of caterpillars. Dunn has the larvae metamorphose in to 'the numb gnaw of the grub in his skull / that's growing fat on his paralysed faith' as Darwin contemplates his return to 'home-shores made strange by what he brings forth'. Similarly, the recognizable forms Dunn employs to Bugs only serve to heighten our sense of the strangeness of this poetry.