Book of Demons

by Barry MacSweeney

Barry MacSweeney wrote his first poem 42 years ago at the age of seven. He has been an alcoholic since he was 16; two years ago his hard drinking almost cost him his life. After a series of life-threatening fits and convulsions, which culminated with his being hooked up to life support in a hospital, MacSweeney underwent rehabilitation through detoxification in several hospitals and an addiction clinic. The Book of Demons records his fierce fight against addiction, the demonic visions that arose, and still arise, and the great love of those who helped save his life. Between times of ravaging, though, MacSweeney wrote the sequence Pearl, included here as a prelude to The Book of Demons. While Demons is a book of hard relentless experience, Pearl is pure lyrical innocence, a poetic sequence of harmlessness before harm set in. Pearl is an ode to the mute Northumbrian girl of the same name, whom MacSweeney taught to read and write on a slate in the rain, his first love.

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

From The Boy From The Green Cabaret Tells of His Mother:
‘Born in “The Village”, Benwell, Newcastle On Tyne, July 1948. Educated Rutherford Grammar School, best subjects art & english. About 1963 picked up in France a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. Then Baudelaire, Laforgue. Wrote first poems at school. That was a cissy thing to do of course. Began job as reporter on local evening paper. Met Basil Bunting, poet. Met Tom Pickard and Jon Silkin. Showed Bunting Walk poem, it came back sliced down to about 4 lines and a note: Start again from there. My first real lesson. Reporting gave me a sense of what words could be: economy and just get down the needed things, with no frills. Open to the city and the country. You can walk out of Newcastle for half an hour and be in greenery. The city gave words a harshness, like the steel or coal. Then I wd flit off to little stone cottage on the fells and fish for trout, and pick mushrooms. & swim in the freshwater lakes. Began to translate Laforgue, Cros, Corbiere.
1966-67: newspaper packed me off to Harlow Technical College, Essex, on a full-time journalist diploma course. An opposite life altogether. Synthetic new town, a dormitory to London. Its population, commuters with a vengeance. And the land was flat, that was a shock. An utter antithesis to Newcastle. Everything was so clean and clear-cut, and the people, they didn't belong, and had no roots in the town. Oasis. It was impossible to get involved. My eye, my colour/sluice became arbitrary for the first time. It was merely a funnel, and events and actions got a natural response from me. In Newcastle I was always too involved, always leaving pieces of myself against the walls. I wrote The Boy From The Green Cabaret poems in Harlow, and some political things for the first time. It was here I really woke up. Poems were fast and often, but it was bitter and solitary too. Spent days looking for some natural spot in the whole synthesis: found it, a small duck pond with sluice and lily-pads and footbridge. Told later it was one of the town planner's landscaping tricks.
Left here July 1967, sans honneur, carrying a bad character report in my hand & some poems, returned home to get the sack. But they didn’t like the cut of my face either. Since then jobs as chief reporter in Cumberland, dole, reporter, social security, dole, gardener, dole. Now helps run Morden Tower poetry readings, and publishing posters and books. & of course writing poems. Wants to see poets get away from revisionism. Nobody returns in glory to Lucknow. and this is June, 1968, Newcastle.’