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clear sky
14.8°C
E 4mph
 | Sunrise | 4:01AM |
| Sunset | 8:32PM |  |
Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
P.ublished 18th July 2026
arts
Poem Of The Week: Marky By Ian Duhig
Marky
Is minic do bhris béal duine a shrón.
- Irish proverb
Watching this cormorant on the Wharfe
hold open its wings to the admiring sun,
I recall Marky Malone on his stag night
removing his silk suit jacket very slowly
to show off his Bullworker pecs to us
and the man he'd picked out to fight -
who smartly coshed him across his beak
and swanned out of the silent public bar.
Marky flapped, half-in his jacket sleeves,
head back, gargling up blood as if he tried
to swallow a fish of pride stuck in his throat,
like a tame cormorant with a neck ring.
hold open its wings to the admiring sun,
I recall Marky Malone on his stag night
removing his silk suit jacket very slowly
to show off his Bullworker pecs to us
and the man he'd picked out to fight -
who smartly coshed him across his beak
and swanned out of the silent public bar.
Marky flapped, half-in his jacket sleeves,
head back, gargling up blood as if he tried
to swallow a fish of pride stuck in his throat,
like a tame cormorant with a neck ring.
The tendency to locate an unlikely avenue of thought in a moment's pristine contemplation is a characteristic of Duhig's work: here, his narrator's intense focus seems to precipitate tangential speculation, as if a leap of the nostalgic imagination might naturally be resolved into the changeful rhythms of three quatrains with the help of a single image.
Marky Malone's stag night hubris - the Bullworker pecs, the selection of the wrong opponent - is almost a guarantor of his fall; Duhig's takedown is persuasively concise, as concise as the avian vernacular in which it is delivered: the cosh across the 'beak', the swanning swagger out of the now silent public bar.
The narrator stretches the metaphor to complete the humiliation: his final verse observes the broken man in images of his own degradation, reduced to a flapping bloodied mess, as newly tame as a 'cormorant wearing a neck ring', and as chastened in his arrogance as the unheeded Irish proverb intended him to be:
'Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose'
More information here.