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Poem Of The Week: Images Of Spit By Ian Duhig

Images of Spit

1 William

Your White William is valueless
for impact and power in school insults:
its pristine unadhesive sud’s
a slap in the face with a lace glove.

2 Gilbert

The solid gold yolk of a fresh egg
stands proud as sunrise on its plate,
so should a hawked emerald Gilbert
clump like shamrock on your victim’s mug.

3 Boris

The flob this bodies forth is serious:
kettle-cheeks as of putti or seraphim
best mash such tobacco-y mucus.
First class overall. The cream of the phlegm.

What raises the platform for Ian Duhig’s consideration of the unprepossessing viscous expectorant, is the witty wordplay with which he describes its unlikely trajectory. And if the act of ‘bodying forth’ is practiced sometimes in the street or on the football pitch, but most often in the playground, we should not forget that the act of expulsion, once a commonplace in British pubs, was usually mitigated by the presence of a spittoon as a repository for directed ‘Gilberts’. For which small mercy the footloose punter must have been mightily grateful.

The expelling of bodily fluids is not a recent thematic preoccupation for poets but it is almost always accompanied by guffaws: the ‘flob’, unless intended as an outward and visible expression of spleen, or finishing up down the back of one’s trousers, resolutely refuses to be taken seriously. Duhig’s epigram, his Palladas moment, is similarly disposed to the kind of comedy that animates teenage boys, whilst reaching for metaphors that precisely capture the texture and consistency of the gobbet, and the facial contortion demanded of the person responsible for its gestation and flight.

The poet’s own contortions – his narrator strains to extrude the perfect figures to create a likeness – are rendered as though in earnest: the effete and vapid ‘White William’, an ‘unadhesive sud’ whose texture is as insubstantial as an empty threat; the ‘clump’ of ‘Gilbert’ stuck with gratifying traction to a ‘victim’s mug’; and finally, the ‘flob’, mashed like cud and launched from bullfrog Gillespie cheeks, in an act of unanswerable profanity. All sterling reminders that ‘Images of Spit’ is nothing if not a visual poem, emboldened as it is by a delicious line in half-rhyme and a lively metrical interchange.

‘Images of Spit’ is taken from Ian Duhig: New and Selected Poems, published by Picador (2021), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

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