arts

Poem Of The Week: Ground Gives By Ian Duhig

Ground Gives

Bauman’s Tetley lecture on his Liquid Modernity,
how free-floating anxiety is our condition now,
brought Heaney’s ‘Anything Can Happen’ to mind,
its phrase ‘Ground gives’. Anybody who stepped

on an icy pool, believing it strong enough to hold
their weight, discovers liquid modernity’s meaning
in a gut-churning rush as knowledge swamps faith.
I felt such a churning as my ground gave way when

I first heard Seamus had died; at a loss for words
for the poet who’d been my grounding in this art,
who’d meant so much, whose solid words melted

to his soft Latin vale: ‘Noli timere’. I can only think
of words on an Irish headstone: ‘Ni bás ach ag fás’,
‘Not dead, but growing’. Ground gives. He gave.

Finding a species of consonance between a Seamus Heaney poem about unanticipated, often cataclysmic, change, and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s seminal study of anxiety in a world without markers, Ian Duhig’s elegiac sonnet posits the fixed points of hope and continuity, or hope in continuity, against a centre that refuses to hold.

In ‘Ground Gives’, whose title itself yields ground to Heaney’s poem ‘Anything Can Happen’, Duhig’s persuasive metaphor of thin ice overturns our orthodoxies, our traditional articles of surety, in a blundering uprush of water, ‘as knowledge swamps faith’.

If ‘Ground Gives’ is a poem of grief, of loss of those indices of certainty in the wider sense, then Duhig’s profoundly affecting concluding tercets restore proportion in epitaph as his narrator pays homage to Heaney, to the latter’s valediction, ‘Noli timere' (‘Don’t be afraid’), and to a kind of redemption in the idea of continuing growth. The kindness of the poet’s simple final words do no more than mirror Heaney’s own generosity of spirit, in a landscape of turmoil and tectonic shift.

‘Ground Gives’ is taken from An Arbitrary Light Bulb, published by Picador (2024), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

More information here.

Also by Steve Whitaker...

Book Review: A Cool Head In Hell - Harry Silman

Poem of the Week: And Then the Sun Broke Through By David Butler

Ways of Seeing: Katharine Holmes And Three Generations Of Dales Artists

Poem Of The Week: Last Christmas Cracker By Steven Matthews

Our Children's Playless Days: Snagged On Red Thread By Jazmine Linklater