Review - Ian Duhig – New and Selected Poems
Ian Duhig worked with homeless people for fifteen years before becoming a writer and he is still actively involved with minority and marginalised groups on artistic projects. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Cholmondeley Award recipient, Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize four times. He lives in Leeds with his wife Jane.
It's difficult to know where to start when faced with a volume as heavy as this – selections from 7 collections and some additional recent poems. I met Ian on a writing weekend in Cumbria in 2018 and have been following his wry posts on “formerly known as Twitter” since, as well as reading some of his poems online and attending a reading he did in his adopted home of Leeds, but this is the first time I've looked in depth at his work.
With some poets I can race through the book, often returning to poems I like later, or revisiting them at leisure. I found this harder to do with Ian's poems, which is why I've been attempting this review for 6 months. I wanted to stay with each one, to find out more about it, to try to dig into the story, or get under the hood of the poem. This isn't always easy , and just when you think you've got a handle on his style or themes, he'll blind-side you with something completely different.
He was born in London to Irish Catholic parents and moved to Yorkshire, where he now lives. These three aspects inform a lot of his work and his political thinking – his Irish roots and Catholicism, London in his childhood, and Yorkshire. The politics is sometimes below the surface, and sometimes up front. His anti-racism poems are very clear about where he stands.
Technically the poems are always on the money – and he varies form seemingly without effort. Prose, sonnet, simple ABCB rhyming, lists, concrete poems and free verse are used as required for the right effect. He mimics and references TS Eliot. He writes poems that match traditional tunes – I enjoyed the mocking of eating herring during Lent to the tune of Ewan McColl's Shoals of Herring.
My original idea was to focus on the new poems, but in the end I wanted to look at several that appealed to me throughout the book.
Mummers is a poem set in 1913 in Northumberland and describes the tradition of an annual play involving dressing up, with blacked faces (not so controversial back then) and music. One of the primary characters in The Fool is described like this:
Blacked up like he'd come straight from work
their Fool wears a huge pair of drawers
his hair is the last sheaf of corn:
it tips back his head and he roars
“My mother you burned for a witch
my father you hanged from a tree
but now I'm the sword-dancers' fool
and who will dare meddle with me?”
The poem makes its turn two stanzas later – next year being 1914.
And next year they'll tremble no less
at the song in another Fool's throat
while this year's is dancing in France
to a whistle with only one note.
Mummers is in The Speed of Dark, which I think is my favourite of the collections, based on these selections, but that's a tough call.
Of the new poems, my personal pick is Rue, a brief and pointed look at how the death of MP Jo Cox was viewed overseas and in her own country. I also like Grand Union Bridge, referencing back to the death of an Irish immigrant girl in the Paddington area of London in his childhood, her body found in the canal dug by earlier immigrants. In modern times other countries and races have taken over to a large extent from the Irish as targets of casual and direct racism, but this certainly took me back to the days when Irish people were seen as fair game for abuse in life and on Saturday evening TV.
In class I was asked “Is it called Paddington
because of all the Paddys who live there?”
My brother changed his name from Paddy.
Much of the reason for staying with certain poems for a while was the need to research the names and stories behind them. Some of the poems have Notes but these aren't always there and don't give the full story. There are deep poems about history and mythology but he can also question potential anti-Semitism in Star Trek. There's also humour, and joy. In Lark In the Clear Air, he describes in sonnet form how his sister walked through fields on her birthday before jumping into a recently crusted cow-pat.
She skipped up frost fields like bleaching sheets
but heading back, she paused to catch her breath,
and saw her footprints rounded everywhere
like ginger biscuits on a tablecloth.
I don't think I can do this large collection of poems justice, so you'll have to try them for yourself. Is it an easy read? Not always. But why should it be? Stay with it and the rewards will come.
You can hear Ian read some of his poems, including one of his best, The Lammas Hireling, here:
https://poetryarchive.org/poet/ian-duhig/
You can buy the book, published by Picador, on Amazon in physical or Kindle form, and from other less globalist outlets.