Barry MacSweeney: Hellhound Memos
Barry MacSweeney, Hellhound Memos. The Many Press, 24pp. ISBN 0 907326 27 7
MacSweeney is one of those writers whose work becomes richer and more coherent the more of it you read. Tics of phrase, character and landscape recur in poems written years apart, with a cumulative effect like the products of an oral-formulaic bard with the dee tees. The result can make a small pamphlet like Hellhound Memos read much bigger than its volume - nearly every page connects with something the reader's, with luck, met before, altering MacSweeneyworld forever in the process. Chatterton, phlegm, stink, Shelley, the Jesus Christ Almighty and toes jostle in a long drawn out trip which flashes from an urban Tyneside of Ecstasy dealers and joyriders to a hellhound-filled rapefield, and won't stop. (The concerned reader can also follow the progress of MacSweeney's war against the - surely innocent? - DIY chain B&Q:
The very low odour tough acrylic formula
of B&Q Safe Paint with satin gloss finish
is venal. Civilisation too good a word for it.
(for PBS one day early))
The pamphlet's title is from a song by bluesman Robert Johnson and, like Johnson, MacSweeney's demons are as much inside him as out - he's part of the urban terror (is an urban terror?), knows it and knows the ride won’t stop till he jumps off, taking his place among the suicidal and suicided:
[Anne] Sexton toppled in tonight
crashing into the doctor's blue swivel chair.
We fed her stomach to the drain
and walked her home.
(WRINGING THE SHINGLE)
The poems' logic allows for reams of guiltless language, rolling lyric of the kind MacSweeney seems never to have considered not doing:
Your tentship, your azureness, your cornflower
blue, flung over me, your right as rain, your
Bob's your uncle, please court my swelled heart.
Please spill me the dew from cusloppe's rim.
They're also very funny. Uncomfortably so, because the reader can no more hit on a stable emotional response here than MacSweeney can. From the jittery wordplay of 'carping and crapping' hellhounds, through jokes ('So quiet and pleasant it is as if I am in B&Q'), the overriding image I personally take away from the sequence is that of the Hey-wait-a-minute facial expression which passes now and again between MacSweeney-the-pursued and MacSweeney-the-pursuer:
I have not been trying with much effervescence to overcome
my love for alcohol in favour of language lately.
(GARBLED MANIFEST—NO HELLHOLE UNTURNED)
A likely story. These are long-line poems of the best kind, meaning that such lines don't serve to cushion the reader's disappointment at not finding prose: here the contrast of heavy stresses to slow the ear and long sweeps of line for the eye means that you can actually feel your eyes moving across the page - a rare experience, and well worth the admission.
This review first appeared in issue 1 of Object Permanence magazine. Barry MacSweeney died in May 2000.
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