The Speed of Dark

by Ian Duhig

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 Ian 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 greed. 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. This collection again shows Duhig as one the most capacious and brilliant minds in contemporary poetry

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Born 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.

Reviews

[Myra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book to do for a class presentation and fell in love. I was not at all familiar with Fauvel but Duhig's notes provide enough background to grasp everything he does. Not everything is centered around the tale of Fauvel and each poem has great moments of humor. Word play, satire, and content make this my favorite poetry collection I've ever read.

[James Askari · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems emerge from Duhig's engagement with a fourteenth-century text, Le Roman de Fauvel, which pursues sometimes dark polemical purposes by imagining a vile horse, Fauvel, as king of twelfth-century France. These texts justify the Crusades and suppression of the Cathars. Everything in the poems connects both adventitiously (sometimes it seems, purely so) or as a matter of an uncompromising moral vision, which concedes that poetry and fantasy can be just the cover for nastiness. Duhig's poems are intimate with forms that seek little truck with being poems, and with people who are anti-poetic--violent, closed-minded, vindictive or selfish. His lore is strange and usually turns out to be correct, in defiance of 'BBC2' orthodoxies (which state, for instance, that the etymology of 'cocktail' has been lost, when the word may mean 'not a pure breed, not a thoroughbred').

Many of the verse forms are ballads, and there's also a lot of prosy free verse. The inspiration for poems is finally as rank as Fauvel's noisome coat. (His supplicant fawn on him, 'currying favour' by untangling it). Duhig's writing is sturdy, ungainly and morally sound. The rejection of sophisticated embellishment or honey comes close to being pig-headed. These are mid-life poems, aware of the possibility, difficult and also worth resisting, of changing horses mid-stream. The horse-lore is copious and resourceful (both carefully and snappily put together in the noun-phrase ballad 'Behoof'). There is no thematic disjunction between the Fauvel poems and poems on Leeds as supposedly hollowed-out socially, blaxploitation in the music industry, Johnny Cash or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. In one sense, right, or honest invention, will out, like the theory of the 'country boy' Menocchio that the world has curdled from 'primeval milk', the angels the worms in its cheese. Burned by the Inquisition, 'time saved my philosophy': 'like angels, milk, verse-ends, worlds/and jigs, a worm must turn'.

[Lawrence Pettener]

This is one for poets to read.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of poetry is not the same as a novel(stating the obvious). Some poems I enjoyed some were brilliant, others left me either cold or bemused.On the whole the bok was worth reading and some parts will stay with me.

[Mark Brown]

poetry worth coming back to,although he is v.allusive Ian Duhig lines are not as dense-packed as say Geoffrey Hill,bit more accessible