"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 "Bad Shaman Blues" presents the conventional poetry volume with its doppelganger – dark, destabilising, daft – and was was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize as well as being a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
- ISBN13 9781852247287
- Publish Date 20 February 2006
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 22 October 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 160
- Language English