The Mystic and the Pig Thief

by Fran Lock

The Mystic and The Pig Thief is, in part, an elegy. It is also a book about the pain of being imperfectly assimilated, a book about being torn between the culture you come from and the society you're obliged to live in; a book about being pulled both ways while belonging to neither camp. The poems cross back and forth between bleak rural isolation and claustrophobic urban squalor, in Ireland, in England and in Europe. Mystic and Pig Thief are travellers, but more than being literally itinerant, they are spiritually homeless, and this to a terrible cost. The central sequence charts their inevitable transition from nomadic life, to a scattered, so-called settled existence on working-class sink estates. They stumble and struggle, picking up scraps of tradition and folklore; flirting on the fringes of the new-age 'crusty' scene, but always marginal, peripheral, only ever truly real to each other. Although portions of the sequence take Ireland as their back-drop, The Mystic and The Pig Thief is not about Irishness, or even about "Travellerness" per se. It is about loss, about the fall-out from, and the strategies for, dealing with an identity in rapid dissolution.

136 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2014

Reviews

[Denni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, 5 stars! I've done it now! For me, this poetry speaks, it sings. I just want to keep reading and rereading this book, picking out poems, starting back at the front end, all of it. I know it won't be to everyone's taste, but I love it because it's exciting and vibrant, because it makes me smile for the pleasure of the words, the ideas, the patterns, makes me read it aloud and then in my head and then aloud again. Thank you, Fran Lock!

[Tôpher Mills · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a superb collection of poems that tear into the reader as we follow two anti-heroes of love living apart in Croatia, Ireland and London and occasionally and haphazardly coming together. The writing is both scathing and scintillating. Fran Lock seems to be creating a whole new world for her poetry to exist in.