17n}t2017 Wallflowers at Beverley by lan Duhig I Books I The Guardian

Wallflowers at Beverleybylan DuhigSaturday lT March 2OO7 OO.O5 GMT

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 bodhrin, 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 Ruairi Dall's 'Give Me Your Hand',

they applauded and rose to the dash of his playrng -

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 alllanguages;

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.. From The Speed of Darkby Ian Duhig (Picador)

Topics. Books. The Saturdaypoem

httos://wwwthedrrardian-cnm/booksf20tl7 lmarllTlfeatrrresrevie-ws.ouardianreview2S

26t10t2017 "This living hand, now warm and capabre" by John Keats I poetry Foundation

FOETRY FOUf{trATIOH

"This living hand, now warm and capable',BY lQltN KEATSThis living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy drearning nightsThat thou would wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calm'd-see here it is-I hold it towards you.

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18t10t2017

/Friday ooem. 'l-he Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf

Home (/) { Blogs (/biogs) I picador (/b1ogs/picador)I Fritiay poem: The Ba1lad of B.[indJack Metca]f (/blog/february*2016/friday-poem-rhe-ba11ad-of-b1lnd-jack-mercalf)

12 February 2016

This weeks Friday poem comes from Ian Duhig's collec tton The Blindinspired his newRoadmaker. ran also spoke to us about the 1ocal heroes who

collection, the real blind Roadmakers .

on the unveiiing oi his statue in Knaresborough

Verse b,rr t-he numbers, numbered yearssumming up the dead:

sma1l fingers feehng headstone faces -how youngJack iearnt to read.

A man, he reati behi.nd their wordshow men and women felt,

like faces, suits and numbers stampedon tavern cards he dealr.

Sharp dealer, traffic r.vas Jack's gift,in fish and flesh he'd trade:

a soidier, smuggler, fiddler, guide -roadmaker, when that paid.

He'd spin his tales and webs of taras dark as all he sarv:

he was our Daedalus of roads,we're each his Minotaur -

Asterions, his starry ones,we travel by his iights

a hundred thousand miles each day.his rhousand anci one nights.

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18t10t2017

Still dark in bronze on Market Square,he hears the high road snarling

who heard them sing the Bonnie Prince *but traffic's stiil Jack's darilng.

His waywiser beside his bench,around his metalled hat

his secret tale's picked out in brailleand what it says is that . . .

Friday poem: 'The Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf

From Ian Duhig' s The Blind Roadmaker (http : / /lD1DlD.picador.com/books/the-blind-roadmaker).Ian spoke to us about the blind roadmakers lvho inspired his new collection.

(http : / /vwvw.picador. com/books/the-blind-roadmaker)Frost said he never started a poem knowing how it would end and for me that is also true of books. Foa long time my new one was going to be called'Ashtrayland', after the name the Leeds gang in BernarcHare's study'Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew'have given to "England'] its history, culture andpolitics remote to them, their term foreshadowing Tory MP Mark Garnier's speech before the lastelection in which he described "dog-end" Northern constituencies.

My father knew a lot of irish proverbs and 'ls minic a bheir dall ar ghiorria', a blind man often caught ehare, came to me when I found out the main road from my house into Leeds, as many more in theNorth, was made by a blind man, Jack Metcalf. He became a kind of Yeatsian anti-self to me, multi-

talented, always knowing where he was going iike the old song while I stumble along in the light. Other blind roadmakers in mybook include refugees or migrants like my parents making their way in strange new worlds; love itself, blind but always finding away and me, "wandering abroad" as the Vagrancy Act had it.

Interesting projects tempted me to digress, including a site-specific project honouring Sterne's Tercentenary at Shandy Hal1. Byrondescribed'DonJuan'as "a poetical Tristram Shandy" and a long ottava rima piece here, an anthology commission, is an hommage trand parody of his outrageous style and includes a fight between Geoffrey Hill and Jeremy Prynne. The elegy for Manuei Bravo isvirtualiy a cut-up of the Book of Job for this devout Angolan Christian who hanged hi.mself so his son could stay in England,sacrificing his soul as well as his life according to his deeply-held beliefs in the most devastating example of love I know The bookopens with Ka{ka's love Dora Diamant, herself a refugee several times, who told a charming story about Franz that became asKa{kaesque as the asylum seeker regulations by the time I'd finished with it: an updated measure from a Ben Jonson masque is allabout being wrong-footed whiie trying to express affection.

i hope there is a broad sense of unity through patterning and thematic echoes that holds these different elements together. I takethe view that if I find something lnteresting, there's a chance I might be abie to communicate my enthusiasm to a reader in thefuture. There's a famous image by the Polish poet Norwid about coal, ashes and diamonds: I want to share the diamonds I found inAshtrayiand' among other wonders, like how a biind man can catch a hare.