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Bulletins From Saint Nix

Barry MacSweeney, Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000.
Bloodaxe, Tarset, Northumberland, 2003. 334 pp. £12.

I. The Selection
First off: Wolf Tongue is Barry MacSweeney's own selection, mostly. He put it together in May 1999 and intended to add later works. Some of the final selection was unclear except for instructions about exclusions: none of the 150 unpublished poems, no Mary Bell Sonnets, no translations. From the period 1965 to 1986, Wolf Tongue embraces everything in tempers of hazard except for Fool's Gold; adds two poems from The Boy From the Green Cabaret and a 1973 poem for John Everett previously found only in an edition of Poetry Review; includes all the Odes; adds 'Black Torch Sunrise' and 'Blackbird' from the late 1970s; adds Ranter and places 'Finnbar's Lament' as its coda. In the post-tempers period, Wolf Tongue includes eleven of the Hellhound Memos (the selection is based on several of MacSweeney‘s public readings: excluded are 5-7, 12, 14-17), the complete Book of Demons and a selection of late works and uncollected poems: the title-poems of Sweet Advocate and Postcards from Hitler, five individual poems, and the whole of Pearl in the Silver Morning.

II. The Book
As object: Wolf Tongue’s front cover has a photograph of an Arctic wolf (attributed to Art Wolfe!), in mid-stride and staring straight at the camera. The rear cover has a photograph of a stationary B MacSweeney with an almost-smile staring straight into the camera, above a small reprise of the shadow of the wolf. The book is handsome and workmanlike; the binding will last and the text is more readable than the Paladin tempers of hazard collection.

III. Dramatis Personae
The book includes Mr Barry MacSweeney and the various personages who make up the democratic identity of the author, Barry MacSweeney. Such people include Jim Morrison, Thomas Chatterton, Bobby Sands, P.B. Shelley, Sweeney of Ireland, Robert Johnson, Anne Sexton, Pearl, S.J. Litherland, men in detox and men on death row – who are and are not the same men. Also appearing, in the role of Other, are: The Jesus Christ Almighty, Lady Thatcher, assorted Marxist Cambridge prefects and poets-as-tamed-animals who are and are not the same people; and, in a glimpsed other life that might have been, Pearl as mother and S.J. Litherland.

IV. The Books of This Book
The Last Bud opens this book. It is, as John Wilkinson has argued in Angel Exhaust 13, a remarkable work whose style and tone are rooted in O'Hara's 'In Memory of My Feelings' and in Shelley. It is a long farewell to light and the natural man: such a rejection parallels the prose Elegy For January in which, seeing 'growing neatly into bigotry' as the only alternative (and demonstrating a view that will plague him throughout his work/life – everything tending to be either black or white), MacSweeney wrote: 'Then it is better to be unnatural'. In Just Twenty Two – And I Don’t Mind Dying MacSweeney flexes the quick startle/shock troop lines he'll use again later when he needs to circumcize the listeners' ears. Written (he claimed in an interview with Eric Mottram) with the aid of 45 Benzedrine taken within four hours, it is speed incarnate. In the interview, MacSweeney calls this dense clustering of language his nodal tactic. In Brother Wolf he is inside and outside Chatterton, positing self-destruction as the core of creativity, and begins to take to extremes the bourgeois myth of the outsider artist. In Odes, MacSweeney continues the Just Twenty Two style of attack as a maker of nodes of pus, the poison Chatterton knew and Britain becomes. In the Chatterton ode 'Wolf Tongue', as so often in MacSweeney's works, the 'I' of the poem speaks words the poet could manifestly own, affirming his 'absolute commitment / to a language going north', just as these words on Chatterton's gifts also describe MacSweeney's own poetic ambitions: 'no man so potent / breathes to vitalise / the language in his day'. The line refesters in Colonel B, where language coils and recoils, and further degenerates into Liz Hard and Jury Vet, where headlines punctuate a slippery (body fluids everywhere) guided tour ('nicked from Dante') through a savage satire of an England as fashion show in which MacSweeney mixes up scraps of Chanel, Lauder, Wyatt, Chatterton, sundry fetishistic objects and misogynistic rants: bodies reduced to 'purple slits'; women's mouths 'cum-filled'; women named as 'rudegirls', 'bitchettes', 'urchin spunkette', 'torncunt starlet', 'breezy fucklard titpig'; men reduced to 'manmilk sweat and cloudy come'. In the midst of this, appearing after an invocation to the river to 'rinse her virgin body clean', is 'PEARL WITHOUTEN SPOT OR BODY BRUISE' (105).

In Wild Knitting the headlines disappear, the tour guide bows out: MacSweeney integrates rage and tenderness, the hopeless economics and politically bleak prospects, the anger and frustration of the excluded, love's losses and messes, into a more understated, but far more effective, State of the Nation Bulletin in which all he (poet) has left at the end is word and blood. And, by God, that‘s enough.

In Ranter MacSweeney flags key-words in the poem: 

    word for reduced                             word for bruised
    word for running                              word for banished
    word for betrayal                             words for forgotten victory
    word for bond                                  word for psalter
    the one for moving                           words for slowness in her
    for fast (145)                                    none to be said (148)

He pitches into a history of dissent and heresy, of Ranters, Levellers and Luddites – but also a story of B MacSweeney betraying and betrayed, in a northeast land that is also betrayed. It is his most rhythmically cohesive work, its short lines driving it on with great speed and intensity (whereas his previous works gained their intensity from their bravado variety of line-lengths and explosive diction). The poem is dominated by the gerundive form of verbs, which suits its lively use of anachronism, ricocheting from various pasts to a present England 'reduced' to 'breaking the back / of land he loved' (173). In the 'Flamebearer' section, MacSweeney has the woman address and accuse him (as do Pearl and Jackie Litherland in later poems): 'For you the wounds are real. // Ranter, love, broken prince' (176). Pearl is also, doucement, prefigured in 'Ranter' with 'Recording on a slate in the rain... Your silence beginning with O' (165) and 'privy perle withouten spot' (173); the seed of The Book of Demons is also present: 'Ranter / flamebearer / prince with a torch song / five years on the edge / lip of despair / one on the brink / drink to drink' (171).

In Ranter's 'comet's tail', 'Finnbar's Lament', the tense reverts to past and the lines lengthen until the final section is slowed down to a funereal pace. The 'wronged woman' who first appeared in 'Wild Knitting' is addressed at great length in these moving and dignified verses. Certain lines in the final section are prophetic of the reception given to tempers of hazard and MacSweeney years later: 'My own satires will be turned against me... / apply you justice well. I expect the judgement: / to be driven from the tribe and to be denied' (183). Ranter no more, neither ranting nor raving, he is Finnbar – the blond saint, the end of Barry, the final word, another 'signed resignation' to be followed by six years of silence. Witness the dignity of the final couplet: 

          Her cloakclasp shining in starlight at the edge of an ocean. 
          Her plaid flapping in the southern wind at the world's rim. 
          (184)

A gracious resignation indeed. The death of a youth 'hotting' (joy-riding a stolen car through the streets of North Shields) in the Meadowell Riots in 1991 galvanizes the poet and in 1993 Hellhound Memos appears. Reportedly MacSweeney felt the death of the 'estate / joy-rider extraordinaire' was exploited and sentimentalized into a heroic gesture by the boy's grandfather; the poet is at pains to put the senseless death in its proper light: 

                            I adjust my visor 
          accordingly. Cut, cut, cut. It's my dark, dark memo, 
          almost a badge. I groove in the magenta heat, I lean 
          into it. I don't erect headstones, Hosanna those 
          sky-blue heavens in the fairy tales. I deliver. 
          Into a permanent darkness for the rest of your days. 

          I come down like slate-grey rain. That‘s all. No God available. 
          (187)

As happens increasingly in MacSweeney's later work, the poems' borders are becoming more porous – in and out wander levellers, Percy Shelley, the Jesus Christ Almighty, Robert Johnson, Anne Sexton, Bob Dylan, the Nazi connection, detox images and the late night chemist: all the past and future ghostings. Lines that can as easily belong to a persona or to a confessional MacSweeney appear: "I don‘t care what the damage is. Or the waste. / I enjoy the flames. I can scorch a line, a beautiful / blue and true line through the hull of your lives..." (187). Scorch, indeed. But with a chill never far away: 'Sleet penetrates the weave' (192). Mortality is foregrounded, is in the rhythm as a continuum beneath the long-lined, short-lined, breathing trail-eating poems, and informs the sentimental nursery imagery that enters the work for the first time here: 'I want to be bright shining / as cuticles in the Dunton nursery. / Bright as Aidan's eyes.' (191) 

The myth of innocence continues in Pearl, MacSweeney's most natural work and the work of the most natural MacSweeney. He has ranted and railed against all kinds of comfy accommodation to the Tory elites and has seemed always in loss of some kind, knotted with grief and anger. So the quiet, pleading tone of the first Pearl poem, 'Looking Down From the West Window', is almost a revolution: 'If not too disgusted, hold me / close forever keenly' (195). Also new is MacSweeney's standing behind the 'I' of the poems. Ironic and not-ironic, simply himself standing in simple longing for those innocent pre-betrayal times of his early years, but too savvy and wounded by now to stand long without self-deprecation or a wink to his poet friends. There is a change in the MacSweeney cadence in these poems. Previously a poem, regardless of the projective or compressed energy released on its journey, tended toward a negative ending: 'This is a signed resignation; / I am finished with your kingdom of light' (19); 'I ate your Christian fish. / It made me sick. // Division is your prayer' (81); 'you can‘t persuade / his heart any more / with toys' (87); 'Up for sale / we go, driven into / roots / by blood & silence / of our lives' (94); 'Groin me with a blade' (100). Poems in Pearl tend to move more quietly toward even happy endings: 'brilliant Aprils and Septembers, shine, shine, shine, / I loved you absolutely all of the time' (207); 'We walked there and nearby always so very kindly' (213). Bob Dylan's line 'When your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through' now gives way to his '"Come in", she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm"'. 

Pearl has been well-read-to, knows some visionary poems and knows inside-out the rugged countryside of MacSweeney's boyhood. She is too real to let him fall into nostalgic swoons, too hard-edged to be soaked up by sentimentality, too clear-sighted to fall for fashion's gimmicks – rejecting lipstick as a nothing, she declares, 'I'd like a square meal daily / for me and my mam' (208) – and too uncouth to be reduced to a figure of innocence. 'Pity? Put it in the slurry with the rest of your woes' (197). While one midwife of Pearl may be Douglas Oliver's The Infant and the Pearl from 1985 (as Nigel Wheale has pointed out in his LRB review of The Book of Demons), we have seen the medieval Pearl already in earlier works. 'Mony Ryal Ray' begins 'Skybrightness drove me / to the cool of the lake' (200), likely a paraphrase of the passage in Perle (lines 158-160) from which he draws his title (in rough translation: 'I saw beyond the lake / a glittering crystal cliff; / many a majestic ray rose up from it'). The next two lines of MacSweeney's poem – 'to muscle the wind / and wrestle the clouds' – show that his Pearl is no servant of a Christian allegory; the image of Pearl's fingers 'fanning through the borage groves / and the world vigorous again / in pursuit of renewal', indicates MacSweeney's view that our heavens and hells are here, now.

MacSweeney's vigour for renewal begins to lose its hold of him in The Book of Demons. Given the 'overcooked cauliflower brain / convulsion' (235) that happened to him in June 1995, it is amazing that anything was written after that. After the respite of Pearl, Mr Negative Endless (231) returns with a vengeance. Not that there are not riches in the book. The humour is more powerful and often in a major key: in 'Pasolini Demon Memo', e.g., the Jesus Christ Almighty appears as a 'stripling bare-chested biker' with 'love and hate in Galilee blue' tattooed on his knuckles, and is told in the poem's final couplet, 'Stick around. / You'll make sheriff one day' (236). The negative endings that pull the Demons poems forward are mostly deletions of hope and annulments of the future: 'there are no happy endings' (221); 'Forgiveness sold out no longer available' (254); 'and under a completely / useless rainbow' (262). The zenith/nadir of negativity is 'Himself Bright Starre Northern Within', with its boldface epigraph 'There is absolutely no record / of goodness in the history of my soul' and its five-page litany of 'delete' commands. An extraordinary tide of synonyms takes us from 'delete' to 'vomit' (an emptying if ever there was one): 'delete upstanding citizen, terminate, erase, abolish, / abrogate, annihilate, very late, annul, cancel, cease, destroy, efface, // excise, negate, obliterate, literally omit, so close to vomit' (259). The poems' 'saintly, thorny words' (231) dance and stagger around the themes of blesses, curses, wounds, experiences of ecstasy, mortality, self-deprecation pushed to extremes of self-hatred, and that all-consumer, the booze. As a tour through hell it differs from Dante's in that our guide is the afflicted one, and from Jury Vet's hell in being primarily internal and incidentally political. It is the roller-coaster tour a reader can expect from a detox experience. The first poem ironically celebrates the end of the demons in its title: 'Ode To Beauty Strength And Joy And In Memory Of The Demons'. The Romantic illusion ushered in by such a title has vanished by the end of the next poem, 'Free Pet With Every Cage': 'The light of recovery is just a format. / The light of recovery is just a lost fairy tale / seeping with ferndamp / in the bluebell vales of your childhood' (221) – lines which are also a negation of Pearl‘s apparent healing power. 

One artistic choice that keeps the sequence as compelling as it is is the variability of speaker and perspective: sometimes Barry MacSweeney with support from his open disguises, Swanne, Ludlunatic, MoonySwoony, Madstag, Pookah, Lenin Wolfboy; Barry appearing solo, 'the fratchy fractured Geordie ploughboy / playboy', and in duet with himself, 'I&I / myself am in a poisoned / corner, Chatterton-style, / entirely deconstructed'; Pearl, in 'Pearl Against The Barbed Wire'; Jackie Litherland, in 'We Offer You One Third Off Plenitude' and 'The Horror'. The couplet at the close of 'Hooray Demons Salute The Forever Lost Parliament Of Barry And Jacqueline' travels far and deep: 'Said: should do, but I won't. / And she said: that's the story / of your life. Almost man' (247). But our zero hero knows that too, that he is 'almost man': no matter what epithet you think to throw at him, he has already assumed it. He'll guide you through his vomit-strewn gutters; his lashings out at the detox professionals; his hallucinatory hells; his identifications with dissenters brutally squashed – 'I was a sacked village myself' (283); his mausoleum of literary self-destroyers; his risings on the updrafts of love's hopes and fallings on recognition of his own beast-self; his love-song to himself from the idealized Pearl and his hate song to the real Jackie Litherland – 'go then, sober & seeing everything so damned Warwickshire clearly' (256); through to the final two poems addressed to his fellow detoxee, Tom. Tom, who no longer knows his right from his left foot, whose brain is 'an oversteamed cauliflower / lolling in the Locomotive Arms' (287), whose wife no longer visits, is the only audience left for MacSwoony: these two left-over men stagger to attention to the Sex Pistols' rendition of 'God Save the Queen', as closing time is called on The Book Of Demons. 

Over-written? Yes, because over-lived. Too much? What do you expect from the poetics of Excess? Just a few sections that are too journalese for me, that have lost the tightness that has worked so well before, even amidst the adjectival rushes MacSweeney favours. Perhaps the rushes work so well because they are balanced by contrasting compressed lines: and all works because it brings that sense of a mind/body/soul in constant flux. No rest for the wicked; no rest for Saint Nix.

Following Demons in the book, but dating from 1983, is the curious 'La Rage'. A sort of Barry MacSweeney-meets-George Formby on the piss at Blackpool pier doing ska-rugby songs: 'Chaucer calls it / mercyless beautie / Little Richard calls it / tutti frutti' (293). Next is the horribly defeated 'Don't Leave Me', which strikes out the mendacity of the self-written blurb on Demons ('He has now recovered'): 'my hidden bottles, my stuffed away corks. / They want me to come back they want me to come back they want me' (300). Sweet Advocate has a similar structure to The Last Bud – in four parts, with alternate lines indented – and a similar tone; it is perhaps intended to reverse The Last Bud's resignation from the kingdom of light. Indeed the ending of the later poem asks
forgiveness for his anger: 'Forgive me, sweeetheart, I am an angry man / tonight' (308). O'Hara and Shelley are again in the mix: 'Then we'll ride / Shelley's mysterious light / and Shelley's weather forecast / which blazes and shines / before the sinking of this deadened world' (307). In Shelley's 'The Cloud', Sun's 'burning zone' and Moon's 'girdle of pearl' are bound by the cloud, which also holds the 'million-coloured bow'. The cloud states, 'I change, but I cannot die' and 'I silently laugh at my own cenotaph... I arise and unbuild it again'. Sweet Advocate reveals MacSweeney‘s residual Romanticism:

          ...These overwhelming bits and things.
                   Possibilities are always passing clouds.
          I seek you – and would love to call you darling –
                     from the broken pieces just as well. (308)

MacSweeney the champion of the 'unnatural' does not fully quit the stage. He takes the spotlight in Postcards From Hitler. What say, Barry? There is 'direness' in it, and 'forget-me-nots' and 'wank fever', and a schlock and spiel of dreadful anachronisms. If this – 'Seeing St Paul's Cathedral / and the whole of Coventry burning made me come / very heavily' (311) – is for you, then this is for you. The next poem, 'I Looked Down On a Child Today', veers as far into the sentimental as Postcards into the shock factory. 

The closing sequence is gorgeous. Pearl in the Silver Morning has no false notes in its ground-swell of mortality. There is the almost unutterably poignant plea from Pearl: 'cool your raging fire lovelorn heart – for me', which risks the sentimental but stands square in its truth; as does the last couplet: 'We are not stone but we are in the grinder. Everything is lost, and we are dust and done for.' This sequence simply needs to be heard. But I cannot bear to leave MacSweeney there – in the dust, even though our Saint Nix seems to have willed himself there. In 2002 Peter Riley published False Lapwing, two poems that MacSweeney had intended to go into April Eye, a collection for Riley's sixtieth birthday. 'Pearl Standing Alone in Sparty Moonlight' concludes:

          I flash my poet's wings and you look at me outstandingly 
          and starring                  and staring                  completely 
          Soundless in the night       Tongue still as a furnace 
                                            switch

A word for readers of MacSweeney that is, 'switch'. He can go from knees-up to pibroch in half a bar. At its best, which is remarkably often, this poetry switches and almost throws you overboard, it switches track, tone, diction, century; it switches us with its lashings; it invigorates even from its broken pieces.