There is a challenge in reading poetry which is intrinsically personal to the poet. Often, in order to get the most from a piece, you need to know the people concerned or the places described or the events which happened. Without this, striving for interpretation can feel a little like reading with one metaphorical hand tied behind your back.
One way to counter this challenge is to ‘open out’ the poem, to find a way to make it ‘universal’, to give the reader something to cling on to.
For me Ian Duhig’s collection, “An Arbitrary Light Bulb”, is insufficiently universal – the outcome being that I struggled to connect with the poems. On that basis the book fails the ‘so what?’ question. Without attachment, I don’t really care about Duhig’s history in Leeds nor the many poems about, well, poems… He may be talking to me, but I stopped listening very early on.
Ian Gouge - Writer 