Bad Shaman Blues

By W.N. Herbert

Bad Shaman Blues are what we sing in middle age, when our visions and our virtues seem far away. They also lament the role of contemporary poetry: reached for in trauma, otherwise ignored. The poet as shaman cuts a reduced and comic figure - which immediately suggests W.N. Herbert. Packing his medicine pouch with classical lyric and barbarian spell, the Scot explores his border territories. Hadrian's Wall becomes a mirror through which to embark on an absurd shamanic flight to - naturally - Siberia.

Bad Shaman Blues is a Through the Looking Glass book, in which the familiar and the foreign confront one another. Sofia and Novosibirsk, Crete and Kolkatta, are all distorted in its hall of mirrors. In the textual underworld of the Scots tradition, literary ghosts are stalked by critical machines. Herbert's latest book presents the conventional poetry volume with its doppelganger - dark, destabilising, daft.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1852247282
• ISBN13: 9781852247287
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Length: 160 Pages