In ‘Ashtrayville’, a poem from his cracking new collection The Blind Roadmaker (Picador:2016), Ian Duhig transports us into the world of the dream by way of a line borrowed from Anthony Thwaite: ‘Imagine a city. It is not a city you know’. And this poem reads like a dream (and no, not in that way) because very soon you find yourself in a world of ‘colourless rainbows’ and ‘pot holes… not open to negotiation’.
This mix of musicality with the inexplicable continues through the unrhymed quatrains that make up the rest of the poem. For instance, you are continually given information that you cannot really know, definitively, empirically, to be true, ‘deserted avenues of birdless trees’ and when ‘you walk down the centre of streets / till one chooses you, its second choice / you realise’. A combination of the second person with the realis mood unsettles – you’re given to asking how you can know these things, much like in a real dream (and let’s not go getting started on the concept of a ‘real’ dream).
It’s not until we meet the ‘man wearing black overalls’ who tells us he is ‘painting double yellow lines’ that things begin to get really dark, especially when, ‘You notice the paint in his pot is black.’
But none of this is as unsettling or as plain scary as the last line of the poem. I think I’ll leave you to discover that for yourself though.
jackisreading 