Blind Roadmaker

If the starting point for a number of poems in Ian Duhig''s richly varied new collection is Sterne''s Tristram Shandy, its presiding genius is the great eighteenth-century civil engineer, fiddler and polymath Blind Jack Metcalf - whose life Duhig here celebrates, and from whose example he draws great inspiration. Writing with an almost Burnsian eclecticism, Duhig explores urban poverty, determinis...