Nominies (Paperback)

Upon reading 'Nominies' I come to realize how wrong we were. Duhig's world is much darker and more treacherous. Take the title poem, for example. A note tells us that 'Nominies' is a Yorkshire word, meaning 'children's chants', but the poem itself, far from being innocent or facile, concerns itself with infanticide, racism and child-abuse - both contemporary and historical.. The effect is naturally disturbing, especially as the ghosts of the dead children emerge to speak their dreadful stories in near sing-song rhyme, reminding us that the child-atrocities of our own age have a much deeper and darker history. Indeed, the incongruity between style and subject matter here is not unlike that encountered in some of Blake's songs. It's hard not to draw comparisons and contrasts with the likes of 'The Chimney Sweep' and 'The Little Black Boy, and wonder about the vulnerability or viability of 'innocence'. This has to be one of the most thorny and sensitive issues of our times. The gulf between our sentimental ideas of innocence and the hard realities of the world children, like adults, have to inhabit, has certainly not decreased since Blake took on the cause of small boys sent up the soot-clogged and baking hot chimneys of London in the 1700s. Ours is a world almost hysterically sensitized to child-abuse and child-prostitution, and other poems in the volume, 'Jungle', for example, take this on, letting the children speak for themselves in chillingly 'worldly-wise' strains.

But although there are many dark poems in this volume, there is much to delight in too. Technically, Duhig is both skillful and concise, deft at both lyric grace and rollicking balladry. His work never shies from the difficult, the ugly or the unsavoury, and there are moments of real earthy, Rabelaisian relish; uproarious Swiftian satire This is fortified by good scholarship and what this reader feels to be a genuine moral sensibility. Duhig's gift is multi-faceted, and its different qualities act as checks and balances to each other. His satire and artfulness rarely seems irresponsible or too pleased with itself, and his moral vision carefully avoids the sanctimonious note. Like Peter Reading, this is a writer who can offer a critique of our times, with the resources to do it.

Just one note of doubt. In 'Who Killed Freddy the Dolphin' Duhig informs us in his note that 'Freddie the bottlenose dolphin delighted the thousands of people who came to see him disport in Amble harbour with amazing penile feats and healings of the sick till he was shot by a local fisherman...' Well, what is this? Fact or fiction? Local news or local folk-lore? What are penile feats, exactly? The poem boldly asserts, though not exactly in earnest I suspect, that Freddie's demise was brought about by, of all things, penis envy! You might laugh, but I can't help but feel that this poem half reads like some facetious flight of fancy, or at best a deliberately distorting act of analysis, so perverse as to seem obscurely wise. True, it is certainly arresting, and maybe it is poking fun at N.E. machismo, but it's the one poem in the volume where Duhig seems less than convincing. For this reader, the joke needs some explaining.

This small reservation aside - an urgent, compelling and inventive volume.