Sweeno’s Beano

Nigel Wheale

  • The Book of Demons by Barry MacSweeney
    Bloodaxe, 109 pp, £7.95, September 1997, ISBN 1 85224 414 3
  • Poems 1980-94 by John Kinsella
    Bloodaxe, 352 pp, £9.95, April 1999, ISBN 1 85224 453 4
  • The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony by John Kinsella
    Arc, 108 pp, £7.95, January 1997, ISBN 1 900072 12 2
  • The Kangaroo Farm by Martin Harrison
    Paper Bark, 79 pp, £8.95, May 1998, ISBN 0 9586482 4 7

A tear caught in a mussel shell turns to pearl, the Ancients believed. Barry MacSweeney’s The Book of Demons begins among the living with ‘Pearl’, a 22-poem sequence evoking a childhood love between the poet-persona and his sweetheart, the daughter of a poverty-stricken smallholding family from the ‘rain-soaked’ ‘raw-bone’ laws – the high moors around Allen-heads in Northumberland. They are two poor kids growing up in the late Fifties. She wears a ‘Co-op coat’; the boy-poet’s heart is

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