Barry MacSweeney- "the fringes of the poetry scene"

The Book of Demons (publ. 1997)
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
'Angry, fierce, unruly verse that does what English verse has supposedly forgotten how to do visions of demons that haunted the author's long recovery from alcoholism'
- Steven Waling, City Life.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Demons-Barry-MacSweeney/dp/1852244143
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852244143

Wolf Tongue - Poems 1975-2000 (publ. 2003)
"Barry MacSweeney's last book, The Book of Demons, recorded his fierce fight against alcoholism as well as the great love of those who helped save his life - though only for three more years. When he died in 2000, he had just assembled a retrospective of his work. Wolf Tongue is his own selection, with the addition of the two late books many regard as his finest work, Pearl and The Book of Demons."
- Bloodaxe Books
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852246669
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wolf-Tongue-1975-2000-Barry-MacSweeney/dp/1852246669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251915996&sr=1-1

Horses in Boiling Blood (Equipage, Cambridge, 2004) http://www.cambridgepoetry.org/equipage.htm

"Rod Mengham’s Equipage has published the extraordinary imitations of Apollinaire
that Barry MacSweeney wrote before his death in 2000. MacSweeney’s death by alcoholism was a harsh end to a long drinking lifetime, and his relationship to Apollinaire was an addiction to the Frenchman’s spirits, a neediness visceral, cultural, and political.

The chimes of consonance between provide an intellectual rationale for the project: Apollinaire spent his last years witnessing a new century’s wondrous flights of technological and human form, as well as the unprecedented carnage of the First World War; MacSweeney spent his last days seeing that century out, between two wars in Iraq, singing songs of praise and lament.

But more powerful than this cultural exchange is the exchange of affections
across time. To imitate Apollinaire, as MacSweeney does here, is to perform a dynamic transfusion of life fluids, to imagine the Frenchman as a drinking partner across death’s way. It is also to make friends with European modernism, to go to the innocent heart of modernist experiments with the language of the new, while bypassing the obduracies of the Poundian line. In recovering Apollinaire’s transfiguring love of the ordinary, MacSweeney goes straight back to the source that underwrote both Breton’s fraîcheur and Ginsberg’s kindliness."

More at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/531_piette_macsweeney.pdf