The Mystic and the Pig Thief (Paperback or Softback). Questo articolo non è disponibile.The Mystic and the Pig Thief (Paperback or Softback)

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.

Fran Lock is a sometime itinerant dog whisperer and poet, now living and working in London. Her debut collection Flatrock (Little Episodes) was launched in May 2011. Her work has appeared in various places, including Ambit, Poetry London, The Stinging Fly, and in Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt).