Mishtooni Bose reviews The Speed of Dark by Ian Duhig

In his latest collection, Ian Duhig draws inspiration from the medieval satirical compilation Le Roman de Fauvel, situating himself in a lineage of French literary remanieurs, and specifically Chaillou de Pesstain, whose 1317 version of the Roman came soon after the Premier Livre (1310), compiled by an anonymous author, and the Secont Livre by Gervès de Bus (1314). Notes to The Speed of Light contextualize Fauvel itself and its role as the structural and imaginative catalyst for the modern collection. The Speed of Dark is, in Duhig’s words, an ‘updating’, drawing its satiric animus from the original’s concern with the corruption of medieval institutions, and notably the Knights Templar, suppressed, as Duhig notes, for supposed idolatry. The epigraph to his collection comes from Thomas Arnold, who proclaims that ‘the spirit of chivalry’ is the ‘spirit of evil’ that ‘predominantly deserved the name of Antichrist’. The etymological thread linking cheval and chivalry, extending in Duhig’s mind to ‘the US cavalry’ and the ‘Trojan horse’ of UK politics provides this collection with its thematic coherence no less than ‘Islam’s one-eyed Antichrist Dajjal’, whom he finds associated with ‘Templars and George Bush’ on assorted websites. The presiding genius of The Speed of Dark is Fauvel himself – ‘your man-stroke-horse-stroke King Fauvel’ - a hybrid man-beast fawned on by popes, cardinals and others. His transgressive image litters BN fr. 146, a manuscript of the Roman that exemplifies what Michael Camille calls an ‘aesthetics of hybridity’ despite its censorious attitude towards (in Duhig’s words) ‘distinctions dissolved, things becoming what they should not.’ Horses of all kinds similarly fill Duhig’s collection, most notably in ‘Behoof’, where the horse anatomized by Gradgrind stables with Pegasus, Rosinante and the ‘ritual bride for Celtic kings.’ Duhig ends his notes with the hope that his own collection will participate in the viral transmission initiated by the medieval Roman so that, ‘like the cursed videotape in Hideo Nakata’s Ring, even copies and other versions can restart the cycle’. So it was that, fresh (if that’s the right word) from watching Ring, I embarked on reading this collection which, it can fairly be said, removes us quite some way from the flatlands of the unmediated confession that is the natural terrain of much modern poetry.

Men have become beasts (‘hommes sont devenuz bestes’). Crusading is a Bad Thing. Virtus moritur. Vivit vicium. The task of satirical poetry is to avoid aestheticizing its subject and anaesthetizing its audience. (The neutering of of BN fr. 146, transformed by its longevity into an objet d’amour for modern medievalists, is a salutary warning). But satire flattens: one way, for example, to avoid being bludgeoned by the self-satisfied ironies of the ‘General Prologue’ to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is to read it as a satire on satire itself. Hybridity at least keeps things in motion and as such is an irresistible lure for the imagination, where satire would have things in black and white. Duhig knows the risks: they’re encoded here in another epigraph from Blake (‘But thou read’st black where I read white’) no less than in the portraits d’encre that balance the colours of BN fr. 146 with their moralizing monochrome. Duhig’s poetry strenuously resists the flattening effect, embracing and proffering knowledge or, at least, facts. Thus, even while it exposes a hapless teacher, the poem ‘Moshibboleth’ educates its readers in the relationship between Fauvel and one of its antecedents, Le Roman de Renart. Some of the poems here draw on goliardic energy which is most clearly in evidence in the rhyming octosyllables of ‘Fauvel’s Prologue and ‘Dame Fortuna’s Antilogue’. In the ‘Prologue’, the updated anti-hero flies in from Charles de Gaulle and launches a virtuoso piece, linguistically and conceptually agile, with Duhig deftly stitching together imagery from the Roman and his own political preoccupations. The momentum compels admiration, but the commitment to producing a verbal equivalent not only for the visual richness of BN fr. 146 but also for its portraits d’encre regularly takes its toll:

Right now, America’s our Rome,
my rival stable – God’s new home –
you ruled the waves: she rules the air
(and riding airs is work I share)
but now your naval empire’s wrecked,
your tongue one Yankee dialect,
your politics a Trojan horse
or fig-leaf for her naked force.
If ‘cheval’ bore our chivalry,
our heirs the US cavalry
ride helicopters to a fight
to show their Saracens what’s right …

Elswhere, in ‘Civilization’, George Bush’s ‘Press Room echoes like a minaret’. Crusading is a Bad Thing, remember. But such moments remind us that satire is as likely to make us stop thinking as its orgulous, egregious and, frankly, easy targets would like to do.
 
At several other points in the collection, Duhig succumbs to the easy satisfactions of etymology. ‘Out of Context’ is spellbound by it (“’Ink’ leads back to ‘encaustic’, so to ‘holocaust’”). Etymologies, one wants to cry, aren’t hidden clues to the Meaning of Things. They’re conceptual footprints telling us what those before us have made of the world. There are different kinds of rough music elsewhere, such as the riffs on refrain/bridle/burden in the poem ‘love me little’, the heavy-handed punning in ‘Eye Service’ (“each lyric ‘Je’ sans frontières/in every town the only game”), the unambitious reportage of ‘Communion’ and “‘The Art of White’ at the Lowry”, a poem that hurls barely-mediated cultural baggage at its readers.

Etymology is a false guru. Ask me not where a word comes from; ask me where it is headed. The weaker poems in this collection show that someone sufficiently pumped up with anger and armed with a stash of dictionaries can write. The stronger poems here put the dictionaries to one side and get on with the infinitely harder task of thoroughly alchemizing imagination, thought, language, personal and cultural memories. Duhig has the courage of a more introverted muse in the dignified ‘Wallflowers at Beverly’ with which the collection opens, in ‘Mencken Sonnet’ (‘Buñuel, lifting an image from St. Thomas Aquinas/for the mechanics of the Immaculate Conception,/talked of a ray of light falling through Noilly Prat/onto the ardent base spirit of the gin in its glass’), and in ‘Coda’, a meditation on the fishing-net:

Electrospun, invisible,
a knotless mesh, this matchless shift
will cast no shadow but a spell
to check and catch the breath of fish.

‘Do only that which is uniquely yours’, Alan Garner once memorably counselled in an interview. The most rewarding moments in this collection occur when Duhig breaks free from Fauvel, revered as a ‘beste autentique’ by shop-soiled medieval popes, and writes entirely on his own terms.

Ian Duhig, The Speed of Dark (London: Picador, 2007). £8.99.

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.