DUHIG, Ian

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Nationality: British. Born: 9 February 1954. Education: Leeds University, Yorkshire, 1974–77, B.A. 1977. Family: Married Jane Vincent; one son. Career: Hostel worker, Roma Drugs Project, London, 1977–79; hostel manager, Extern, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1979–81, and Derwent House, Leeds, Yorkshire, 1981–84; director, Leeds Housing Concern, Leeds, Yorkshire, 1984–87; co-ordinator, Pgasfholme Project, York, Yorkshire, 1987–91. Since 1991 freelance writer. Awards: Winner, National Poetry Competition, 1987, for Nineteen Hundred & Nineteen; Writer's award, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1996, for Nominies; shortlisted for Whitbread and Forward awards, 1992; T.S. Eliot prize, 1996. Address: 16 Pasture Terrace, Leeds LS7 4QR, Yorkshire, England.

Publications

Poetry

The Bradford Count. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1991.

The Mersey Goldfish. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1995.

Nominies. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1998.

Other

Editor, The Nightwatchgirl of the Moon. Ilkley, Yorkshire, ILF Press, 1998.

Editor, One. Ilkley, Yorkshire, ILF Press, 1998.

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Critical Studies: In Public and Private in Contemporary British Poetry, by Peter Porter, London, Vintage, 1995; in Poetry Today, by Anthony Thwaite, London, Longman, 1996.

Ian Duhig comments:

I write out of the experience of the Irish diaspora and so appear in anthologies in two countries (Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Patrick Crotty, Blackstaff, Northern Ireland, 1995, and also The Penguin Book of Poetry since 1945, ed. Crawford and Armitage). I attempt to link this with my work among homeless people, especially in my most recent book (Nominies, 1998). This gives me an excuse to roam the world and use all registers, including, I hope, humor.

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Born in England of Irish ancestry, Ian Duhig brings to his work a keen sense of postcolonial irony. Steeped in history, his poems reveal the arrogance and deceit within the power dynamics of institutionalized religion, politics, and language. At times Duhig's historical references are overly obscure and poorly contextualized. Often, however, the poet achieves a provocative juxtaposition of Old World and postmodern views. His speakers are likely to be victims or outsiders: an exiled transsexual anarchist in revolutionary Mexico, Irish patriots caught in a maze of betrayals, or a Japanese mother starving during a wartime blockade. In "From the Plague Journal," from The Bradford Count, the mother states simply,

   I sold my son's thousand-stitch belt
   for peaches and eggs which I mashed and strained,
   mashed and strained. Still my children died …

More typically, however, Duhig grafts the detached and mocking point of view of the late twentieth century onto his historical figures. In "The Irish Slave," for example, also in The Bradford Count, a priest kidnapped from Ireland and living in a sultan's palace compares his present life with the austerity that would have been his lot in Ireland and concludes, "Castration has been a good career move." Similarly, ironic references pervade the speech of the disgraced court attendant who, in "Note," from The Mersey Goldfish, relates that he was given

   … an offer I couldn't refuse,
   the chance of a new position. It was missionary
   …
   not as hard as the conversion of the Jews;
   remote, but the word was leprosy was dropping off.

Duhig's irreverent tone is effective here in uncovering the hidden ugliness he sees in colonialist attitudes.

Conflicts over language also figure prominently in Duhig's poems. Several deal directly with the English suppression of Irish words or the inevitable mutability of common expressions. In "Nothing Pie," from Nominies, the poet observes how his native Yorkshire speech differs from his Irish father's and from his own son's, while "Talking God," from the same collection, relates a conversation between the deity and a Navajo "code talker" from World War II. When the Navajo asks, "—What of the Dogfaces who ordered our ancestors into a land where nothing grew but shadows, to share insects and weave bird-traps from each other's hair, to lose the robe of dawn, the robe of blue sky, the robe of yellow evening light and the robe of darkness?" God answers with "—Shit happens." In this case Duhig's use of a Forrest Gump-like banality is at odds with the gravity and urgency of the subject.

Throughout his work Duhig displays an interest in vernacular forms, particularly the ballad and the song. Indeed, several pieces in Nominies, which itself is the Yorkshire term for children's chants, were originally conceived as part of a musical presentation. While not structurally complex, these poems use the seeming innocence of singsong rhythm and rhyme to accentuate the presence of evil in daily life. This can be seen, for example, in the title poem:

   I've heard of the children poisoned,
   I've heard of the children shot—
   I've even heard some call this love
   but I think not.

Hints of ancient alliterative verse patterns can also be found in Duhig's work, as in "Brut," his version of the story of Helen of Troy in The Mersey Goldfish-

   For horned Menelaus
   the Greeks took Old Troy,
   salted its vineyards,
   slaughtered its folk,
   poor innocent bastards

—or, less obviously, in "Reforma Agraria," in The Bradford Count, in which

   the light oil of the gun
   like watchmaker's oil,
   …
   ran from the Lugers,
   ran from Berettas,
   down into the eyes
   of wounded land-leaguers …

Though in these pieces Duhig uses a line break rather than a caesura to separate pairs of initial stresses and does not employ strict alliteration, the rhythmic toll of Old Saxon and Old Celtic verse remains.

Duhig's work can sometimes be cryptic, but it is often playful, and it is distinguished throughout by an acerbic wit. His explorations of power and conflict reveal a passion for language and truth.

—Elizabeth Shostak