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:: BEELEY FAR THE NORTH :: Xibalba Books Poetry Series #10 194 Pages: B&W Paperback
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In summer 2022, poet and artist Bruce Rimell visited the Coasts of Antrim, Northern Ireland. After a lifetime reading Irish mythology, and wandering that ancient landscape in his mind for years, this was the first time he had set foot on the physical island itself. Unsurprisingly, his imagination caught fire, and ‘Beeley far The North’ is the result. Framed as a picaresque jaunt around the region of Ballycastle, taking in notable legends and landmarks from around the town as well as Rathlin Island, this eccentric narrative poem takes as its primary inspiration the Middle Irish tale ‘Buile Suibhne’, or, in Seamus Heaney’s translation ‘Sweeney Astray’. Rather than retell this tragic story of this frenzied and cursed figure, half wildman half broken bird, through a different perspective, however, Bruce chose to take poor Suibhne’s madness as a character to inhabit, eyes through which to experience this part of Ireland in a madcap way which mirrored the rapid “seven days, eight nights” of his sojourn there. In doing this, he has also tentatively begun to forge something of a new, unconventional, and hopefully unique, approach to psychogeography, which he has playfully termed the beeley. Oddly unorthodox but always vibrant in tone, ‘Beeley Far The North’ is an experiment in trying to speak of the human dynamics of landscape in a fresh and hyperactive way. |
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