If an information system had a sense of humour and a grasp of its own politics and decided to send itself up in the act of retrieval, the end result might not be unlike a poem by Ian Duhig.
Mind you, it would have to have Irish roots besides, a sense of musicality and access to the older folk wisdom of both these islands, as embodied in Mother Shipton:
You'll know her face's sickle moon
From moth's wings, Punch, old bills for plays,
Her metred words of metered fate
From Pepys, Defoe, the internet.
Mother Shipton, like many such figures in Duhig, is part of an older heritage he has been intent on disinterring through several books now, as a kind of lost or buried critique of the falsenesses of the present. Its imagined centre is Leeds, where he lives and where many elements coalesce – Islamic, expatriate Irish, World War veteran, lonely goth – in a single crisis of the spirit cut off from its healing sources. The way back to these is the way of indirection – mazes, leaps of association, verbal or otherwise, shufflings of popular and highbrow, anything that throws the devil (a lover of straight lines, apparently) off the track, and breaks the “da Vinci code” to the immemorial place of writing and being.
And knowing this, my pen was free again
Like that sword Arthur freed from its own block,
But mightier and greedy for the words
So close to silence they're worth more than gold.
My quest was ended: I began to write
This poem backwards, as Da Vinci might.
(Blockbuster)
Like the guide in Robert Frost's Directive, Duhig "only has at heart your getting lost", but the quest for the grail is also a lighthearted one, delightfully embodied a couple of years back in Digressions, a tercentenary celebration of Laurence Sterne's York-based Tristram Shandy and in many ways the ur-volume to the present one. There (and here), Duhig is to be found "Shandying about" Leeds and its environs, digressing to digress a la Sterne himself, making outrageous connections, invoking local ghosts from Mother Shipton to Bert Lloyd, but, most importantly, Jack Metcalf, engineer, fiddler and blind life force, the master image behind the imaginings, private and public, of the present book:
Sharp dealer, traffic was Jack's gift,
In fish and flesh he'd trade;
A soldier, smuggler, fiddler, guide –
Roadmaker, when that paid.
If Jack Metcalf the blind roadmaker takes pride of place among the genii loci of these pages, it is because he embodies the protean work of poetic imagination but also because what he created (roads) was public, extended, external to himself, as Duhig's own work and vision tend to be: civic, commissioned, in many cases site-specific. The inner ground where Eros and Death fight it out is not really his territory, though subject to exquisite visitation from time to time, as in the Jonsonian dance of stresses that is Give Me Your Hand:
So take my hand now, take the time;
Roll past and future in a ball
Till here and now our bodies rhyme.
For soon we won't, for good and all.
Deliberate simplicity of forms, popular but never populist, is what prevents the poems from caving in under the weight of their erudition. Couplet, quatrain, ballad, song and carol are all deployed to brilliant effect, even, rather witheringly, an alliterative blast out of William Langland, where the Christian medievalist in Duhig gets stuck in to the thinness of our own liberal secular poetics:
I'll make his ears smart your sorryarse sinner
A smug poetaster posturing penpusher
Who'd write off religion as simply a relic
Of spent superstitions from centuries past.
The packed stanzas, the hankerings after old England, invoke another ghost out of Yorkshire, Geoffrey Hill, though without his politics. Of all the angry young poets of the post-industrial north in the wake of the Thatcherite 1980s, Duhig has remained a man of the old left, content not to catch the Blairite bus to Cool Britannia but to remain with the underdog, the disenchanted young, and the pensioned-off of Ashtrayville:
The watch is inscribed in copperplate
With your name, your title and dates,
That it's for your long service to this city.
You weep with pride. Then you just weep.
Why, in Ireland, should we be reading him? The wit, compassion and, above all, intelligence he shares with other displaced Celts in Britain – Don Paterson, Paul Farley, Sean O’Brien, the late Michael Donaghy – stand as a challenge to ourselves, who have exiled our intellect and kept our charm and lyricism for the highest bidder.
Harry Clifton's Ireland and Its Elsewheres is new from UCD Press. Portobello Sonnets is due from Wake Forest and Bloodaxe Books
