Ian Duhig

Aug 26, 2024 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Katrina Naomi |Douglas Dunn |Alan Payne |Ian Duhig

artsIf Katrina Naomi’s rich brocade of ‘sea’ poems is by no means the first collection to embrace a subject of such compelling intractability, then it is certainly the most extraordinary. Wide-angled, committed to the everything, and to the willed nothing of oceanic abandonment, Battery Rocks holds up a mirror to the sea off Penzance as it shapes and is shaped by the perceptions of those who immerse themselves in its dark waters on a daily basis.

Aug 25, 2024 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Douglas Dunn |Alan Payne |Ian Duhig |Don Paterson

artsModern LoveIt is summer, and we are in a houseThat is not ours, sitting at a tableEnjoying minutes of a rented silence,The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lullTo sleep the under-tens and invalids,The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.

Aug 19, 2024 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Alan Payne |Ian Duhig |Don Paterson |Matt Howard

artsSkew HillSheffieldMy mother’s ashesscatteredbetweenflinty showers;a resolutionat last of allthat reaching outtowards others. Her desireto be usefulshrunkto a circle of roseswhose petalsshake themselves freeof the lossthat shapesa man’s bent backin a fieldstunned by rain. A sense of emptiness inheres to the fabric of Alan Payne’s elegy for his mother.

Aug 18, 2024 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Ian Duhig |Don Paterson |Matt Howard

artsThe truly remarkable thing about Little Toller’s new anthology is the variegated manner of its focus. Featuring the reflections of a number of established writers, emerging from all colours of the sociocultural spectrum, the received impression is kaleidoscopic, a mingling of style with labile observation, rural with urban landscapes, as though each observer was an undirected flâneur, seduced, but not always obsessed, by themes as they pass through.

Aug 9, 2024 | yorkshiretimes.co.uk | Ian Duhig |Don Paterson |Matt Howard

artsThe Courtesan The sun of Venice in my hair’s preparinga gold where lustrously shall culminateall alchemy. My brows, which emulateher bridges, you can contemplateover the silent perilousness repairingof eyes which some communion secretlyunites with her canals, so that the searises and ebbs and changes in them. Hewho once has seen me falls to envyingmy dog, because, in moments of distraction,this hand no fieriness incinerates,scathless, bejewelled, there recuperates.