D.M. Black (David Macleod Black) is a Scottish poet and psychoanalyst. In the early 1960s he studied philosophy at Edinburgh, where he edited a 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, Black later studied Eastern religions at Lancaster, in the department headed by Ninian Smart. He published widely in Scotland and elsewhere in the 1960s; in 1968 his work was included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. In the later 1960s he taught for four years at Chelsea School of Art 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 1972 he has 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 was later Hon. Secretary and of which he remains a Fellow. During the 1960s and 1970s Black published four collections of poetry and several pamphlets. Much of this early work was narrative, influenced by the French poet Henri Michaux and initially somewhat 'surrealist', but becoming increasingly 'psychological' as time went on. The narratives became longer: the fourth collection, Gravitations (1979), consisted almost entirely of three narrative poems, the longest of which, 'The Hands of Felicity' and 'Urru and Uppu', were each about 30 pages long. In 1991 the Edinburgh publisher Polygon published his Collected Poems 1964-1987, with an Introduction by James Greene, the translator of Mandelstam. In the new century he has produced one edited collection of papers, Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: competitors or collaborators? (Routledge New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2006), and two collections of his own psychoanalytic essays, Why Things Matter: the place of values in science, psychoanalysis and religion (2011), and Psychoanalyis and Ethics: the Necessity of Perspective (2023), both from Routledge.
He also resumed publishing poetry, with two collections, Claiming Kindred (2011) and The Arrow-Maker (2017), both from Arc Publications. In 2021 his translation of Dante's Purgatorio appeared in the NYRB Classics series. This translation won the American National Translation award in Poetry in 2022. Married to Juliet Newbigin, he has two stepdaughters and four grandchildren. He lives in London.
Image: © Craig Aitchison