Books by Ian Duhig

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 Sunday

If the starting point for a number of poems in Ian Duhig's richly varied new collection is Sterne's Tristram Shandy, its presiding genius is the great eighteenth-century civil engineer, fiddler and polymath Blind Jack Metcalf - whose life Duhig here celebrates, and from whose example he draws great inspiration. Writing with an almost Burnsian eclecticism, Duhig explores urban poverty, determinism, social justice and the consolations of poetry and music on a journey that takes in everything from a riotous reimagining of Don Juan to the tragedy of Manuel Bravo (the Leeds asylum seeker from Angola who was forced to defend himself in court, and later took his own life). No poet today writes with such a sense of political and social conscience, and The Blind Roadmaker affirms Duhig's belief in poetry as a means of commemorating those who least deserve to be forgotten.

Ian Duhig has long inspired a fervent and devoted following. With The Lammas Hireling - the title poem having already won both the National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Poem - Duhig has produced his most accessible and exciting volume to date, and looks set to reach a whole new audience. A poet of lightning wit and great erudition, Duhig is also a master balladeer and storyteller who shows that poetry is still the most powerful way in which our social history - our lives, loves and work - can be celebrated and commemorated.

Ian Duhig's The Speed of Dark is structured around his astonishing reworking of the text of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval text that railed against the corruption of the 12th-century French court and church. In Duhig's hands, however, the tale of the power-mad horse-king Fauvel gains a terrifying and almost prophetic contemporary relevance, and is identified with more recent crusades, crazed ambitions and insatiable greeds. Elsewhere Duhig's many admirers will be delighted by his new ballads and elegies, his erudite high jinks and his low gags - with which he builds on the new imaginative territory he staked out in The Lammas Hireling to such universal acclaim. The Speed of Dark again shows Duhig as one the most capacious and brilliant minds in contemporary poetry. '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 Sunday 'Duhig telescopes topical allusions, scholarly references and coarse humour into tightly-shaped, surreal poems which burst open with explosive moral force' Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times