New and Selected Poems

Ian Duhig’s effortlessly fascinating and endlessly quotable verse has had a shaping influence on UK poetry for more than thirty years. This eclectic gathering of Duhig’s best work draws on material from his acclaimed debut, The Bradford Count, to the present day: the book collects a number of fine new pieces, including an elegy for the late Ciaran Carson. Duhig is contemporary poetry’s social historian; he has wise and powerful things to say about the relationship between community and family, racism and justice, place and folklore, music and language. For Duhig fans, the book will offer a mesmerising retrospective of the career one of our most highly regarded poets; for those yet to discover him, New and Selected Poems represents a marvellous introduction to a radical social conscience, an archivist of strange tales, and one of the most skilful writers now at work.

The most original poet of his generation, 'Duhig telescopes topical allusions, scholarly references and coarse humour into tightly-shaped, surreal poems which burst open with explosive moral force', 'His poetry is learned, rude, elegant, sly and funny, mixing gilded images, belly-laughs and esoteric lore about language (including Irish), art, history, politics and children's word-games', . . .one of Duhig's charms is that, for all his learning, he retains humility, Ian is a one-off, a true original.

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.