The Speed of Dark
By (Author) Ian Duhig
Pan Macmillan
Picador
16th March 2007
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
821.914
Short-listed for Costa Poetry Award 2008 (UK)
Paperback
96
Width 127mm, Height 203mm, Spine 5mm
95g
Ian Duhig's The Speed of Dark is structured around his astonishing reworking of the text of Le Roman de Fauvel, a medieval text that railed against the corruption of the 12th-century French court and church. In Duhig's hands, however, the tale of the power-mad horse-king Fauvel gains a terrifying and almost prophetic contemporary relevance, and is identified with more recent crusades, crazed ambitions and insatiable greeds.Elsewhere Duhig's many admirers will be delighted by his new ballads and elegies, his erudite high jinks and his low gags - with which he builds on the new imaginative territory he staked out in The Lammas Hireling to such universal acclaim. The Speed of Dark again shows Duhig as one the most capacious and brilliant minds in contemporary poetry.
Ian Duhig is one of the Poetry Book Society's New Generation poets. He has won both the Northern and the National Poetry Competitions, and held Creative Writing fellowships at Leeds and Lancaster Universities. He currently lives in Leeds.