Crab & Winkle: East Kent & Elsewhere, 2006–2007
Shearsman Books, £10.95 pb, 163 pp
Buzzing off
In the ‘March’ section of his new collection, Laurie Duggan writes, ‘(but I am the neighbours) // (I am, perhaps, Neighbours)’. The couplet points to several things: being an Australian in England; Duggan’s persona of observant neighbour; the banality and plurality (‘neighbours’) of Duggan’s perspective. The plurality is one of many levels: Duggan’s neighbourly approach is applied not just to the physical world but to ideas, reading, poets, music, politics and history. He is, paradoxically, a neighbour to himself and his own writing.
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