Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Nominies
Ian Duhig's most musical collection gets off to a rollicking start with his phantasmagorical ballad Nominies, which takes its title from a Yorkshire word meaning 'children's chants'. This tour de force sets up the book's themes of inherited treachery and formal engagement - fed by obsessions ranging from religion to homelessness and poetry - which culminate in Who Killed Freddie the Dolphin?, Duhig's blood-curdling lament for the creature whose cruel murder was one of the darkest deeds in recent Northumbrian history. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
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.
New and Selected Poems
Ian Duhig’s effortlessly fascinating and endlessly quotable verse has had a shaping influence on UK poetry for more than thirty years. This eclectic gathering of Duhig’s best work draws on material from his acclaimed debut, The Bradford Count, to the present day: the book collects a number of fine new pieces, including an elegy for the late Ciaran Carson. Duhig is contemporary poetry’s social historian; he has wise and powerful things to say about the relationship between community and family, racism and justice, place and folklore, music and language. For Duhig fans, the book will offer a mesmerising retrospective of the career one of our most highly regarded poets; for those yet to discover him, New and Selected Poems represents a marvellous introduction to a radical social conscience, an archivist of strange tales, and one of the most skilful writers now at work.
The Bradford Count
Ian Duhig's witty and bizarre poems are profane and profound, often drawing on tall tales and strange episodes from history, Irish legend and colonial lore. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. 'Ian Duhig's world is an exciting blend of the old and the new, the tragic and the comic, the grave and the light-hearted... He rifles mythologies, histories, legends and folklores in a manner that is at once devastating and disarming.' - Brendan Kennelly
Pandorama
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 confro...
The Blind Roadmaker
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 which takes in everything from a riotous re-imagining 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.
The Speed of Dark
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 ...
The Book of Leeds
Millgarth Police Station reverberates with the early adrenalin-rush of a case they won't close for years. A teenage boy trails the city centre bars of the eighties in thrall to his hero - a Leeds United football hooligan. A single woman finds her frustrations with men confirmed speed-dating in a city re-invented as a party capital. Bringing together fiction from some of the city's most celebrated writers, The Book of Leeds traces the unique contours that fifty years of social and economic change can impress on a city. These are stories that take place at oblique angles to the larger events in the city's history, or against wider currents that have shaped the social and cultural landscape of today's Leeds: a modern city with both problems and promise.
An Arbitrary Light Bulb
A Poetry Book Society Choice An Arbitrary Light Bulb is Ian Duhig’s most personal collection of poems to date. It takes its title from the most common type of household bulb – yet one whose name is virtually unknown, like many people these poems celebrate. Duhig finds in the arbitrary an image for the randomness of inspiration and of life, haunted here by deaths of family and friends. He laments the lost but also responds to the glories of our existence, especially among the overlooked, with humour, technical variety and contagious pleasure. Starting out from ‘contrary Leeds’, his home for half a century, Duhig’s poems roam widely through history, art-forms, loves and injustices, fired by the desire to share it all with his readers: knowledge, joy, anger and wonder. 'Multifarious and maverick, deeply personal and political, Duhig’s poetic vision alchemises the heart and mind. This is a brilliant collection from a balladeer of our times, a poet who stands for the people, always with a sense of compassion, humility and wry humour' Jennifer Lee Tsai, Guardian
Poems on the Underground
This wonderful new edition of Poems on the Underground is published to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Underground in 2013. Here 230 poems old and new, romantic, comic and sublime explore such diverse topics as love, London, exile, families, dreams, war, music and the seasons, and feature poets from Sappho to Carol Ann Duffy and Wendy Cope, including Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Shelley, Whitman and Dickinson, Yeats and Auden, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott and a host of younger poets. It includes a new foreword and over two dozen poems not included in previous anthologies.
