09 November, 2015

Spotlight On Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig was our guest lecturer in October.


















Ian has won the National Poetry Competition - twice. His forthcoming book,
The Blind Roadmaker, will be published by Picador in February 2016.

Two of Ian's poems were published in the Autumn 2015 edition of Poetry London  and an interview with him can be read in The Compass Magazine.












Wallflowers at Beverley
i.m. Mike Donaghy 

More instruments ring these walls than raised a roof
for God throughout all medieval Christendom;
stone arcades spring like dancers from the Minster floor,
keyed to their lord's calling-on song 'Da Mihi Manum'.

The Irish call the parchment drum this angel quiets
a bodhrán, though she lacks the ordinary beater:
Mike held his like a pen above the skin in wait,
counting on his own heart to inspire each tattoo.

But he might change to flute for quieter audiences,
bored without dancers' feet to ground his syncopation;
when he charmed them with Ruaidhrí Dall's 'Give Me Your Hand',
they applauded and rose to the dash of his playing —

so Mike's book Wallflowers notes offbeat theories:
that we're all God's three-dimensional handwriting
or how a pin's head really can stage angels' ceilidhs —
another made dance the mother of all languages;

then it gives all 'This Living Hand', Keats' last poem,
which dampens my skin like the touch of a felt mute.
I'll sit out this stone angel till she leaves her drum,
raises and plays something quick on an Irish flute.

© Ian Duhig


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