Ian Duhig - Pandorama

Ian Duhig, Pandorama (Picador)

Ian Duhig seems to me the acceptable face of 'political' poetry, being literary as well, not simply polemical and his politics very much a part of his wider, general view.

He is on the side of the underdog, the misfit and the disenfranchised from his indulgent poem of admiration to goths that begins this book, through sympathy with the working class, folk customs and a humane generosity of spirit, to more subversive spirits like Wilde, surrealists or Peter Didsbury.

It is both a local erudition, often taking us back to Leeds, and a wide-ranging internationalist temperament ranging across cultures and at the same time sophisticated in its language and deliberately 'rough' in its vernacular, knockabout wit and ballad forms.

More than anything else, it is the enjoyable rhyming that make the book memorable, particularly in Charivari and Braque's Drum, a poem as jolly in its banter as a Music Hall artiste but on a cerebral aesthetic theme, illustrating quite conveniently how Duhig's mind works with all kinds of interesting ideas matching themselves up.

Charivari is a celebration of that 'rough music' of cutlery, trays and dustbin lids,

Because the beautiful can prove untrue,

you sometimes need to heed Tom, Dick and Harry.

We're here to drum that message into you,

and that's the message of the charivari.

Duhig's sympathies are with the likes of festival goers, juggling, making their own entertainment, outside of the corporate domain of influence, a self-sufficient, shared ethos of the folk festival, WOMAD and passive counter-culture, like the those in goths that 'dance macabre at gigs like the Dracula Spectacular'. But he is still a poet of long traditions, not only the ballads, but Ovid, too, as he recounts Baucis and Philemon in a poem in memorial to a friend, in Flooding Back,

as if the Aire became that element

it sounded always destined to become,

a change to take the breath away from men.

As was recognized by Ruth Padel judging the Forward Prize, it's been a bit of a year for poetry books and a competitive one for would-be prize winners. Although possibly a little slight on the page per pound value for money ratio, that's never a real concern, and if the use of low vernacular was good enough for Larkin, it's not for me to be all effete about it and so Pandorama would be welcome on any short list of mine. But the Forward Prize having somewhat dispiritingly if predictably gone to Heaney, my preference is possibly still with the Lachlan MacKinnon but I'm glad that it's not really a matter of winners and otherwise.