THIS month, to coincide with Ledbury Poetry Festival, the Hereford Times Book Group selection is a volume of poetry by this year’s poet-in-residence, the multi-award winning Ian Duhig.

Pandorama is a slim volume with just 36 poems from a poet who, says Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy is ‘the most original poet of his generation’.

But the brevity of the work could prove misleading because, Tardis-like, each poem expands to embrace something much larger than the space it occupies on the page.

Duhig’s collection is clever, complex and eclectic in its subject matter as he mines poems and songs from the work-camps of England’s itinerant navvies, jihadist training grounds on the Yorkshire moors, football terraces and meetings of the National Fancy Rat Society. But Ian Duhig is not a poet who’s clever for clever’s sake, and a stand-out poem in Pandorama is Via Negativa, a compact, controlled and devastating memorial to David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant in the 1950s whose appalling racial harassment led to his death.

A world of poem-shaped ideas

Looking forward to his week as poet-in-residence at Ledbury Poetry Festival, Ian explained how he was drawn to poetry and what it is about the form that is so appealing.

“I started writing poetry when I was working with homeless people and, never having much time, poetry was the natural thing to do,” he explains. “Poetry is literature in its most condensed form. In poetry you can cover ground more quickly, and, like cinema, it has a dream logic. You’re straight in to it and then straight out again. It’s been said that where prose is like wine, poetry is brandy - distilled.”

Poetry provided the backdrop to Ian’s childhood as well as being a major element of his adult life: “Because my mother went to school at a time when children were made to memorise poems by heart, she’d always be reciting them from memory.”

The great joy of poetry, says Ian, is that it’s the most portable of works of art. “It’s the only art form you can carry complete in your head, it’s better even than a piece of music because you can have the whole thing completely in your mind, and as a writer, if you haven’t got time to sit down and write, you can do quite a lot of work in your head without paper or pen.

“I don’t think it’s a special gift – practice makes perfect. As Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn said, ‘the harder I work the luckier I get’.”

Poem-shaped ideas are everywhere waiting to be found, says Ian, citing his own lucky discovery of the fact that the road near his house had been built by a blind road-maker. A little more research and he learned that Jack Metcalfe had tested the stones for the road by rolling them around in his mouth. Which, he adds, is something that might also excite a novelist, but isn’t a novel-shaped idea. “By the end of the second chapter there’d be little more to say.”

How to order

To order Pandorama at the offer price of £8.54, post and packing free, call the Hereford Times Bookshop on 08430 6000399 or send a cheque or postal order made payable to Hereford Times Bookshop to PO Box 60, Helston TR13 0TP. Allow seven to 10 working days for delivery. Titles supplied subject to availability. Order online at sparkledirect.com.