Interview with Leeds-based poet Ian Duhig about his latest collection An Arbitrary Lightbulb

The reviews have been very positive so far. Published last November it was named as a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Year 2024 and selected as a Poetry Book Society Choice. The Guardian reviewer described it as ‘a brilliant collection from a balladeer of our times’ while The Sunday Times declared it to be ‘Duhig's most moving book, full of memorable poetry not just of skill but of heart'.

The book takes its title from the most common household lightbulb but whose name is not widely known and Duhig uses that as an image for people and places that are overlooked or do not get the recognition they deserve. His poetry celebrates those people and places while also exploring the unpredictable, random nature of life – the losses and gains, the joy and despair. Duhig says that the collection was partly inspired by a sense of time running out.

“This is going to sound a bit gloomy but I was expecting to be dead last year. I am now 70 and 69 was the age that my father died at and I couldn’t imagine me living longer than him,” he explains. “My parents came over from Ireland in the 1950s – like many, my father was an unskilled worker – and that generation were over-represented in mental health institutions and suffering with bad physical health. When I launched the book in London three people from my family were present – me and my two sisters. There were originally 11 children of my parents and we are the only ones left. It’s not just older siblings who have died, both my younger brothers have too. It made me think a bit. I can’t say I am terrified at the prospect of death but I am aware of my mortality – and that runs through the collection.”

He acknowledges, as many of the reviews have highlighted, that this is his most personal book yet. “I feel that I haven’t addressed my personal issues in my poetry before and I felt that if this is my goodbye book I had to address them,” he says. “I also wanted to write about poetry and what it has meant to me and also about the people I love. I felt that I had to think and write about these things – and of course poets are notorious for using everything as material.”

Included in the collection are very moving poems about and for his family and friends, uplifting poems, full of hope and humanity, about the transformational power of poetry and tributes to Leeds historical figures such as reclusive artist Joash Woodrow and persecuted Nigerian migrant David Oluwale whose lives he ensures are recognised and whose legacies he celebrates. Duhig’s poetry has never shied away from the political and many of his poems feature a strong sense of social justice. He worked with homeless people for 15 years before becoming a full-time writer and that experience continues to inform both his written work and the projects he gets involved with – he frequently collaborates with socially-marginalised groups. “Some people think there should be no place for politics in poetry but really everything is political,” he says. “I think if it is used in an appropriate way, it's fine – and some poems require that.”

Duhig hopes that the new collection will reach as wide an audience as possible. “One of the things that is really important to me is that I don’t want anybody to feel excluded,” he says. “I want my poems to be accessible to people who might not read a lot of poetry. I was reading the work of a Syrian poet recently and I discovered that the Arabic word for a unit of poetry is a house. I like that. I would like to welcome people into my poetry, for them to feel comfortable in it and to feel that they take away something from it.”

Ian Duhig: An Arbitrary Lightbulb, published by Pan Macmillan, is out now.