Many of Ian Duhig’s admirers will be familiar with the Roman de Fauvel, the early-14th-century French poem cycle on which his new book is largely based. Some who are familiar with this poet’s extraordinary inventiveness may even wonder whether this roman might not have been dreamt up by Duhig himself.

But no. Fauvel is a genuine character of medieval romance, an arrogantly wicked mixture of man and horse (equine images and references occur throughout the book), an Antichrist and antihero, and the creation of Gervaise de Bus, a poet inspired by the much better-known, late-13th-century Roman de la Rose.

De Bus is exactly the kind of figure with whom Duhig could be expected to have fun. But the medieval poet is not acknowledged in The Speed of Dark; unless Brilliant, a poem that awkwardly parodies Yeats’s Easter 1916 in an account of two present-day Ulster-men “riding a bus into town”, is a sardonic nod in his direction. If so, it would be consistent with Duhig’s procedure here, which involves cryptic references to modern and medieval cultures of many kinds, and mentions for everyone from LS Lowry and Johnny Cash to Thomas Aquinas and the Emperor Charlemagne. His aim is to make a satirical parallel between an age of chivalry that battled to protect Christian holy places from the Arabs and the crusades launched by today’s western powers to safeguard their precious oil supplies. But the comparisons often need to be dug out from a style that, for example in the title-poem, begins to resemble the austere intensity of Geoffrey Hill: “White night. Fauvel in his palace: / melancholy blacked-up Claudius / Hamlet; / high-strung, wrung-withered, restless / despite the silence. Bad dreams. // The walls of Fauvel’s Elsinore / (inscribed with deviant, false music) close in.” Elsewhere, in poems such as Out of Context or Eye Service, about the Knights Templar (“a dark brigade, our horses dark”), Duhig seems too absorbed in the minutiae of his project to let readers in on the jokes.

Exceptions are the compelling Fauvel’s Prologue, and Dame Fortuna’s Antilogue. In the prologue the Anglo-American relationship is summed up in harsh, striding couplets: “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.”

Fauvel hoped to marry Fortune, but in her Antilogue she has him joined to Vainglory – “her face would stop a clock stone dead – / that’s much like what you want, you said, / the power to hold back day and night.” An Audenesque Fauvel Love Song barely qualifies for the satirical sequence, and is one of several pieces that appear to have been enlisted just to support the theme of the book when they stand up perfectly well by themselves. Among the latter is Last Round, a sly, offbeat lyric offering a new take on drinking songs, and Wallflowers, the opening poem, a moving elegy for the poet and musician Michael Donaghy.

This is a less accessible collection than Duhig’s last one, The Lammas Hireling, and leaves the impression that his medieval parallel world, despite comparable conflicts over territory between the West and the Middle East, hasn’t altogether fitted the bill. One turns to the poems that reflect his experience of his severe Catholic childhood – Communion, with its tale of a nightmarish film hired for school from the Vatican Film Unit, or Midriver, which surveys Leeds from a bridge over the Aire: “the Dark Arches, the station, Salem Church – a Methodist kaleidoscope in black-and-white stained glass, sober reflections still on consumerism’s glitter”.

And then there are mysterious and poignant fables such as The Price of Fish, and Variations (“Snow-white Molly Ban, / taken for a swan, / shot in a storm / by her snow-blinded swain”) to remind readers that Duhig’s is, after all, one of the most accomplished, varied and surprising of talents.

The Speed of Dark by Ian Duhig
Picador £8.99 pp96

Buy the book here at the offer price of £8.54 (inc p&p)

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