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    The Blind Roadmaker
    The Blind Roadmaker
    The Blind Roadmaker
    Ebook71 pages31 minutes

    The Blind Roadmaker

    By Ian Duhig

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    About this ebook

    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 that takes in everything from a riotous reimagining 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateFeb 11, 2016
    ISBN9781509809820
    The Blind Roadmaker
    Author

    Ian Duhig

    Ian Duhig worked with homeless people for fifteen years before becoming a writer and he is still actively involved with minority and marginalised groups on artistic projects. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Cholmondeley Award recipient, Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize four times. He lives in Leeds with his wife Jane.

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    • 2/5
      I dunno. Allusive knitting not to my taste except for Selkie.

    Book preview

    The Blind Roadmaker - Ian Duhig

    Ian Duhig

    The Blind Roadmaker

    PICADOR

    Contents

    Half the Story

    The Blue Queen of Ashtrayland

    Blockbusters

    The Plagiarist’s Song

    Bert Lloyd

    The Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf

    The Balladeer’s Lament

    The Wold Is Everything That Is The Case

    Sternomancy

    The Marbled Page

    Indirections

    Shapeshifting Ghosts of Byland Abbey

    The Golden Calf

    ‘Combat Gnosticism’

    The Year’s Mind, Ripon

    Canto

    Mother Shipton

    Ashtrayville

    The Passion of the Holly

    Long Will

    In His Shadow

    Opening Night

    Sardana

    The Rûm District

    Riddle

    Brick Arch

    Give Me Your Hand

    Square Ring

    Contracted Silences

    The White Page

    Bridled Vows

    The Full Weight of the Law

    The Scripture of the Jade Pivot

    Aliens

    Selkie

    Acknowledgements and Notes

    Half the Story

    Franz Kafka, the story goes, encountered a little girl in the park where he walked regularly. She was crying. She’d lost her doll. Kafka helped the girl search for the doll but they couldn’t find it. They arranged to meet there next day to look again for her doll, but still they could not find it. When they met for the third time, Kafka gave her a tiny letter that he told her he’d found nearby. She read, ‘Don’t be sad: I’m only travelling. I’ll write I promise!’ And every day that summer, when Kafka and the little girl met, he’d read a new letter to her describing places the doll visited, what it did there and who it met. The little girl was comforted. When the holiday was over and she had to go back to school, he gave her a doll that he said was the lost prodigal returned, and, if it seemed a little different from the doll of her memory, a note pinned to its scarf explained: ‘My travels changed me.’

    Or so ends this version of the story, popular with therapists, but in Dora Diamant’s own account, our one first-hand source, there was no new doll, nor a message of change and growth; instead, Dora had described a final letter sent to the little girl detailing how the doll met its soul mate and had married him; how it would be too busy with its new family to write again, enjoining the little girl to seek similar fulfilment in her own life. Dora also noted how this affair had driven Kafka to distraction, who’d endured white nights, tortured by his own compassion, feverishly thinking up new adventures for his changeling doll made out of letters and lies and love; how this correspondence had been maintained in this fashion for a

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