The poetic sequence Elegies (1985) brought Douglas Dunn's poetry to the notice of a wide audience when it became Whitbread Book of the Year. The poems, arising from his wife's death from cancer in 1981, are in general short and lyrical. Around the central event are grouped memories of their marriage, and the sequence goes on to trace the process of grieving and a slow approach to acceptance. The measured simplicity of the writing acquits the book of any suspicion of morbidity. 'Arrangements' is especially telling: going to register his wife's death, the speaker finds himself in the middle of wedding celebrations. 'So I say to a clerk, "I have come about a death."/"In there," she says. "You came in by the wrong door."'

Dunn had come to critical attention earlier with the publication of his well-received first poetry collection, Terry Street (1969). This working-class area of Hull, Dunn's home for two years, interested him as a relic of an older way of life, and he observes the people and their culture in the 'Terry Street Poems,' which form the first part of the collection. He seldom offers his own reflections on what he sees, but with considerable skill allows his observations to speak for themselves: 'In small backyards old men's long underwear/Drips from sagging clotheslines. /The other stuff they take in bundles to the Bendix.' The slightly comic detail that the old men's modesty will not allow them to wash their long-johns in public nevertheless succeeds in expressing their old-fashioned dignity.

Dunn's own working-class upbringing in Renfrewshire sometimes surfaces in his poetry, as in 'The Competition' ('And he called me a poor boy, who should shut up. /I'd never thought of it like that.'), though he does not regard his writing as particularly political. The poetic collection Barbarians (1979) takes the side of the underprivileged, expressing their resentment at establishment attitudes. The sequence 'Barbarian Pastorals' has been described by Dunn as 'very Scottish, very local', and the later collection St Kilda's Parliament (1981) also has considerable Scottish content. But Dunn's poetic vision is by no means confined to Scotland: Dante's Drumkit (1993) contains work in the Italian verse-form terza rima, and The Donkey's Ears (2000) concerns the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.

What lies behind his collection of short stories Secret Villages (1985) is not so much class-consciousness as small-town conventionality and hidden emotions. The narrator of 'The Canoes' never quite expresses - though the reader clearly sees - his resentment and envy of the holiday visitors: 'The Barkers looked a prosperous young couple...Their skins were already tanned, which I thought strange for two people at the start of their holiday.' The richly comic story 'South America', in which a grass widow takes revenge on her absent husband by acquiring not one but two illegitimate children, is a masterpiece in its depiction of outraged local decorum.

'"I take it that Mr Docherty's at least managed to get over on leave a couple of times?"
"He was very, very good at writing to me," Thea said slyly.
"I can see that a rather remarkable correspondence has been taking place; I can see that for myself."'