Book description
Ian Duhig’s erudite, compassionate and often wonderfully droll poetry
sits at the intersection of the literary and folk traditions, and moves
in an easy and masterly fashion between them. While this has lent his
verse an enviable musicality and force, it has also written him a visa
to places poets rarely venture. In
Pandorama
, Duhig has mined poems and songs from the work-camps of England’s
itinerant navvies, jihadist training-grounds on the Yorkshire moors,
football terraces, and meetings of the National Fancy Rat Society - and
has painted a far truer picture of Britain’s cultural diversity than
most documentary accounts are able to give us.
It is also one we would rather not confront. Duhig was always an
elegist of great power, but never more so than in the quiet and focused
anger with which he memorializes the tragic figure of David Oluwale, a
Nigerian immigrant whose appalling racial harassment led to his death.
With Pandorama
, poetry’s finest social historian has delivered a riveting book, its
vision as broad and unsettling as its title suggests.
‘The most original poet of his generation’ Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian
‘His poetry is learned, rude, elegant, sly and funny, mixing gilded
images, belly-laughs and esoteric lore about language (including Irish),
art, history, politics and children’s word-games’ Ruth Padel,
Independent on Sunda
y Ian Duhig worked with homeless people for fifteen years before
devoting himself to writing activities full-time. He has won the Forward
Best Poem Prize once and the National Poetry Competition twice. His last
two books with Picador, The Lammas Hireling
(2003) and The Speed of Dark
(2007), were both PBS Choices and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot
Prize. His most recent short story appeared in The New Uncanny
, winner of the Shirley Jackson Best Anthology Award for 2008, and his
most recent musical collaboration, with the Clerks early music consort,
on their CD Dont' Talk - Just Listen
(Signum 2009). He lives in Leeds with his wife Jane and their son Owen.
