The Mystic and the Pig Thief

The Mystic and The Pig Thief is in part an elegy. It is also a book about the pain of being imperfectly assimilated a book about being torn between the culture you come from and the society you're obliged to live in; a book about being pulled both ways while belonging to neither camp.The poems cross back and forth between bleak rural isolation and claustrophobic urban squalor in Ireland in England and in Europe. Mystic and Pig Thief are travellers but more than being literally itinerant they are spiritually homeless and this to a terrible cost. The central sequence charts their inevitable transition from nomadic life to a scattered so-called settled existence on working-class sink estates. They stumble and struggle picking up scraps of tradition and folklore; flirting on the fringes of the new-age 'crusty' scene but always marginal peripheral only ever truly real to each other.Although portions of the sequence take Ireland as their back-drop The Mystic and The Pig Thief is not about Irishness or even about Travellerness per se. It is about loss about the fall-out from and the strategies for dealing with an identity in rapid dissolution.