Ian Duhig: Despatches from Ashtrayland

Ich am of Ashtraylaunde I might introduce myself, after the fashion of your lovely medieval lyric, “Ich am of Irlaunde”, “Ashtrayland” being in Bernard Hare’s study, Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, what his Leeds gang call “England”, a place whose history, culture and politics seem remote to them, a richer elsewhere. Their term adumbrated Tory MP Mark Garnier’s speech before the last election in which he described “dog-end” Northern constituencies his party could afford to forget about. Home.

Harry Clifton is kindly insightful about some of my contemporaries and me in his “Ireland and its Elsewheres” in an essay called Writing the Rustbelt, noting the Irish surnames of many of us. As Harry’s title suggests, we can be like the Shed Crew of poetry, if not unappreciative of the beauty around us: I have a short, bittersweet poem about it in my last book, Pandorama, called Begging Song – “Alms please, be kind: / there is no sadder thing / than to be blind / in a Yorkshire spring.”

My family were Irish and I, the eighth child, the first born abroad, so I have at best a second-hand relationship with your culture. I very much enjoyed stints running a hostel for young offenders in Belfast and as International Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and of course bits stuck from my childhood like some of my father’s proverbs: Is minic a bheir dall ar ghiorria, a blind man often caught a hare, came to my mind as my book changed its name and focus from the more rustbelt Ashtrayland after I found out the main road from my house into Leeds was made by a blind man, master of many trades Jack Metcalf, and I fell under his spell.

Pandorama has work about navvies in Yorkshire, including Darach Ó Catháin (Róisín Bán), but Jack became a kind of Yeatsian anti-self to me, daemonic, who always knew where he was going like the old song while I stumble along in the light. Jack is almost forgotten now, even in the local day centre for the sight impaired where my son volunteered. There are other blind roadmakers in my new collection, refugees or migrants like my parents making their way in strange new worlds and love itself, always finding a way and me, making poems as Frost describes, in a process of discovery, never knowing where they will take you.

A legendary traveller, lover and fighter against injustice, Byron inspired a long ottava rima piece here, a commission to honour the bicentenary of his departure from England in 1816. I have essayed his Don Juan outrageous style and then some: the fist fight my hommage contains between Sir Geoffrey Hill and Jeremy Prynne is far from its most distasteful material. Byron described Don Juan as “a poetical Tristram Shandy” and poems here came from a site-specific project honouring Sterne’s masterpiece in appropriately digressive style – Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius, as Blake has it.

Loreto Todd in The Language of Irish Literature writes of “a recurrent theme in Irish literature: the road and people who, from choice or necessity, find themselves upon it.” I worked 15 years full-time with homeless people after university before going freelance and still do on special projects that now often include refugees. I sometimes take Stevens’ quote that we don’t live in places, we live in descriptions of places, to get them writing personal Dinnseanchas as a way of feeling imaginatively at home in their new circumstances; it shows how much we all live in verbal worlds and this is even more obviously true of poets: stanza means “room”, of course, while “beit”, the Arabic prosodic unit, originally meant “house”. Richard Murphy said in an interview he felt his true home to be in the language; for some, however, it remains their only home.

The elegy for Manuel Bravo is virtually a cut-up of the Book of Job for this devout Angolan Christian, who hanged himself 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 book opens with Kafka's love Dora Diamant, herself a refugee several times, who told a charming story about Franz that became as Kafkaesque as asylum seeker regulations by the time I'd finished with it. Give Me Your Hand might borrow its title from Ruaidri Dáll Ó Catháin's Tabhair dom do Lámh, and its style from a Ben Jonson masque but soon it's recognisably from the hand of the author of From the Irish, described as "the most unsuccessful love poem since WWII".

If my home patch is rustbelt rather than green belt, I still find wonderful things there following Jack’s roads; as a freelance, you have to be like a hedge carpenter, working with materials to hand, which focuses your attention on what is around you: I’m forever quoting “nothing can be useless to the poet” (Rasselas) to get people valuing their own experience when they write, seeing its significance, where it can lead. Teaching with a homeless charity last year, a member had worked in a tea warehouse where chests came stencilled with names familiar from curry menus. They also sometimes carried larvae that hatched into butterflies “with wings as big as a builder’s hands”, in his own phrase. It might sound odd, but it’s hard convincing some people this is the stuff of poetry. I’ve always felt that to be part of the poet’s job, noticing stuff others don’t, the land not the map, reading with her feet like Ovid was supposed to do in the Sulmonese legend and Jack Metcalf did in Yorkshire fact. But both danced in the dark, as poets must from time to time. Poems can have feet and be like pediscripts on the page, invitations to a dance, this is my intention for my whole book: come dance with me in Ashtrayland.

The Blind Road-maker is published by Picador

[ Ian Duhig ]