This is the enthuse about Pearl

To me, Pearl was proof that Barry MacSweeney was back to the form of his
"Odes", a book I'd treasured as a highpoint of English poetry over the
last few decades. The fire, but also the precision, the direction. The
delicate line BM treads with his material, and of course, the rush of his
language. The blurb on the back of The Book Of Demons describes Pearl as
"pure lyrical innocence, a poetic sequence of harmlessness" - to me, this
is quite a long way from the truth. Pearl contains narrative of BM's
childhood visits to his grandfather's home in Allendale ("desolate and
deeply beautiful", the blurb informs us) and his relationship with Pearl,
who can neither speak (cleft palate) nor write (BM gives her lessons,
writing on a slate). Pearl says:

		"I am Pearl.
So low a nobody I am beneath the cowslip's
shadow, next to the heifers' hooves.
I have a roof over my head, but none
in my mouth. All my words are homeless."

There's so much *harm* - past, present and threatened - in this situation
that I wonder what the blurb-writer was thinking of. Think how easily this
sequence could've become a male power-trip boast (I don't think it does -
anyone like to correct me?). BM incorporates harm directly in the sequence
- the possibility of it, in Pearl's life, at every step, and beyond,
cutting in bits of John Clare (another rural life fighting for a voice)
and the Bosnian war story of Irma, where BM has his newshound hat on: 

"Irma, page one if there's nowt better, pet,
for this edition only,
I love you as much as Pearl."

The lining up of these two - "for this edition only" - seems very specific
to me.

Of course, there's much that's lyrical:

"Skybrightness drove me
to the cool of the lake
to muscle the wind
and wrestle the clouds
and forever dream of Pearl."

- but here's where it directly leads:

"Pearl saying when asked by a dale stranger,
'Where's the way to The Grapes?':
a-a-a-a-a-a-a-.

Only the magnificent peewit more eloquent than Pearl."

We've talked before about "The Pastoral" on this list, and you don't have
to be a Miss Marple to know that very little which goes on in "the
country" is "innocent". Pearl's condition is linked inextricably not so
much to any rural archetype as to physical realities: "I'd like a square
meal daily / for me and my mam." One of the things which strikes me about
Pearl is how BM incorporates the wordlessness and its setting into a
sustained figure: using "tongue" as a synonym for "language" for instance,
and then turning it to: 

"They want to tax my ABC, they want to jail my tongue."

BM's concern for "free speech" runs through much of his work. Elsewhere
this line becomes:

"I take my stand and - deliberately - refuse to plead...
Tongue-tied, bereft of ABC, I lap
and soak my whistle at the law's rim...
Shake my chained tongue..."

When BM writes like this his accuracy in colocating, matching, balancing,
is astounding - there's hardly a line of Pearl which doesn't link up with
something else, and for all the passion and dash of it, there's very
little waste, and lots of gems of sound patterning like: 

"Pity? Put it in the slurry..."

A piece of pure cyflythraeth. BM at his most intense.

Hope this helps. More on The Book Of Demons later...

RC



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