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The Lammas Hireling
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.
- GenresPoetry
Paperback
First published May 2, 2003
31 people want to read
About the author
Ian Duhig
23 books9 followersBorn to Irish parents, Duhig currently resides in Leeds.
He worked with homeless people for 15 years before becoming a full-time writer in 1994 and a concern with social issues continues to inform his work.
He has won the National Poetry Competition twice, and in 1994 was named as one of the Poetry Society's 'New Generation' Poets.
He worked with homeless people for 15 years before becoming a full-time writer in 1994 and a concern with social issues continues to inform his work.
He has won the National Poetry Competition twice, and in 1994 was named as one of the Poetry Society's 'New Generation' Poets.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 19, 2023
Duhig writes in this collection about the north-west, north-east and an Ireland remembered through a family past shot with folklore and the uncanny. He is forthright, not quailing from violence, and often embracing its suggestion in the surprise endings to poems (rather than praising the peacableness of 'Wise, Brave Old Njal' 's self-sacrifice for his family, a feuding Viking clan, he says he'd have 'lent a match' to his immolation; whiling away time in King's Cross reading Nostradamus's cock-eyed prophecies, he feigns softness towards the station-master standing besides him, then (in a double-take initially referring to Nostradamus) 'from ear to ear, I cut his throat'). Though there are personal poems about thinking of getting tattooed at thirteen, and his brother, who has spent time inside, the poems' settings are mostly esoteric--the medieval Franks; Vikings; Pizarro's conquest of Mexico; a Nazi doctor experimenting in Dachau, the Qin dynasty. Yet what Duhig thinks about these is as earthy or plainspoken, plain-minded, as possible, speaking of the slow, self-knowing application of the Yorkshire autodidact (almost self-parodically Yorkshire, in fact). The Dachau doctor allows a senseless interest in the persecuted Cathars to instigate his search for a purely physical, bloody 'grail', or 'sang real', presumably vivisecting Jewish prisoners. One of Pizarro's captives made to build his own gallows can only imagine Christ as a 'dragon-pale boy' pushing a thorn through his penis. Saint Columba had a human sacrifice built into the foundations of his church in Iona, something that persuades Pope Gregory to give Christianity on these islands a second start, sending Augustine to Kent. The poems' history tends to be a seamy, scary side, shadowed by enormities and dubious in its facts.
The poems are usually simply worded (this occasionally becomes transcendently powerful, in 'The Fiddle Teacher', about teething babies, and the title-poem, a story of how a farmer hires a casual labourer he comes to think a warlock). They are formal, often stanzaic, rhyming--but unexpectedly--in a register not elevated from prose (and the prose of letters or diaries, not journalism). The syntax tends to be simple, though is richer from exploiting the additional punctuating device of the line-end. Even 'think-piece' types poems of reflection like 'A Dream of Wearing String Vests Forever' (a vest is a 'gaffe at the opera') couch themselves in a form vestigially that of the ballad (there are six or seven of these, too). The bawdy and scatological (Duhig's sister on an Irish morning jumps into a cowpat) are jumping-off points for larger thoughts. Two poems suggest dialogue with working-class sages or authorities, a nightclub bouncer and a tailor; and there are plays on the inscriptions on knives, 'cutlers' poetry'. We learn that Duhig got his start as a poet in looking up the technical words relating to glassmaking in the romances of Catherine Cookson; the then-wealthy Cookson endowed a library to her local university and was rewarded with a 'calculatedly second-rank degree'. Though very often poems of place, in his history Duhig does not seem established, at home (his family sold their Catholicism for 'a mess of pottage' during the Famine). Apparently miscellaneous and highly anecdotal, the collection is large and cohesive.
The poems are usually simply worded (this occasionally becomes transcendently powerful, in 'The Fiddle Teacher', about teething babies, and the title-poem, a story of how a farmer hires a casual labourer he comes to think a warlock). They are formal, often stanzaic, rhyming--but unexpectedly--in a register not elevated from prose (and the prose of letters or diaries, not journalism). The syntax tends to be simple, though is richer from exploiting the additional punctuating device of the line-end. Even 'think-piece' types poems of reflection like 'A Dream of Wearing String Vests Forever' (a vest is a 'gaffe at the opera') couch themselves in a form vestigially that of the ballad (there are six or seven of these, too). The bawdy and scatological (Duhig's sister on an Irish morning jumps into a cowpat) are jumping-off points for larger thoughts. Two poems suggest dialogue with working-class sages or authorities, a nightclub bouncer and a tailor; and there are plays on the inscriptions on knives, 'cutlers' poetry'. We learn that Duhig got his start as a poet in looking up the technical words relating to glassmaking in the romances of Catherine Cookson; the then-wealthy Cookson endowed a library to her local university and was rewarded with a 'calculatedly second-rank degree'. Though very often poems of place, in his history Duhig does not seem established, at home (his family sold their Catholicism for 'a mess of pottage' during the Famine). Apparently miscellaneous and highly anecdotal, the collection is large and cohesive.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews