Biography
D.M. Black (David Macleod Black) is a Scottish poet and psychoanalyst. Brought up in St Andrews, he studied philosophy at Edinburgh University, where he edited the magazine Extra Verse which published among others the Scottish poets Robert Garioch, George MacBeth, Ian Hamilton Finlay and George Mackay Brown. Always interested in religion, he studied Eastern religions at Lancaster, in the department headed by Ninian Smart. He published quite widely in Scotland and elsewhere in the 1960s and in 1968 his work was included in the Penguin Modern Poets series.
In the later 1960s he taught for four years at Chelsea Art School in London. He lived for a time in Japan and later spent a year with the Findhorn Foundation on the Moray Firth (then still headed by its founders, Peter and Eileen Caddy). From the age of 30 he lived in London, training first as a psychotherapist with the Westminster Pastoral Foundation and later as a psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society of which he is now a Fellow. He retired from clinical work in 2016. He now lives in London and Wiltshire, is married to Juliet Newbigin, and has two stepdaughters and three grandchildren.
In the 1960s and 70s Black published four collections of poetry as well as several pamphlets; he appeared in the Penguin Modern Poets series in1968. Much of this early poetry was narrative, initially somewhat surreal but becoming increasingly psychological as time went on. The narratives became longer and longer: his fourth collection, Gravitations, consisted almost entirely of three narrative poems, the longest, 'The Hands of Felicity', about 30 pages long. In 1991 he published a Collected Poems, with an Introduction by James Greene, well-known as a translator of Osip Mandelstam. In 2021 he published a translation of, and commentary on, Dante's Purgatorio, Preface by Robert Pogue Harrison (NYRB Classics).
After a long interval, in 2006, Black published a collection of translations of Goethe (including the Roman Elegies in their entirety), entitled Love as Landscape Painter, and in 2011 a collection of original poems, his first for many years, entitled Claiming Kindred. In this, the interest in narrative has given way to more reflective pieces. In the same year he published a collection of essays on psychoanalysis and values, Why Things Matter: the place of values in science, psychoanalysis and religion.
His essays on literary matters have not been published in book form. He has written in particular on twentieth-century Scots poets including Robert Garioch, George MacBeth, Hugh MacDiarmid, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan, Robin Fulton Macpherson and others. Between 1999 and 2008 he was a frequent poetry reviewer for the magazine Poetry London. More recently he has written about Dante in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles Review of Books and Raritan.