The groundhog days of addiction

By Caroline Spencer

The following article deals with themes of an adult nature which some readers may find upsetting.

During an interminably long lockdown, I’ve run a gamut of challenging books, both fictional and biographical. There is something magnetic about people who never compromise. Despite the hard realities that comes with it, the do or die approach to life is fascinating, and unsettling, to behold. Over the past few months two books have stayed in my mind. Disparate as they are from each other, they all concern people who have no other way of being anything but themselves, for better or worse.

The most recent book was the Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. Set in 1980s working-class Glasgow, the novel follows the titular Shuggie, the sensitive child of Agnes. After her abusive husband leaves her, she falls further into alcoholism and abject poverty.

Sexual violence, and its casual dismissal by others, is a constant. As Agnes tries to remember the details of a savage attack the night before, she shows the bruises on her arms to her friend and neighbour Jinty. Jinty coos faux sympathetically, “To do that to a defenceless wummin? What is this world coming to? The way people take advantage people.”

In a beat she asks Agnes, yet again, to go and find some money for alcohol, the only reason Jinty stopped by her home in the first place. The scene somehow gets worse when Jinty later makes Agnes, now in a dazed, drunken state, dance with the man who provided the booze. As she recoils away from him, Jinty, seeing how she can take advantage herself, shouts “Oh don’t mind her. She was just a bit unlucky in love last night”, says Jinty, knowing full well that Agnes was raped. This is a world where people don’t see others as friends or people deserving of love or respect, but as opportunities to use and abuse.

Exploitation is another constant in the non-fic-

In love with some poetry

tion books. In Songs They Never Play on The Radio, writer James Young describes his time as a bandmate of Nico. Nico was a German singer and actor whose fame peaked during her time with The Velvet Underground. Her publicly long-running heroin addiction became better known than any sort of artistic endeavour. Which is a shame as her incredible music went on to inspire artists after her like Siouxsie Sioux, Elliott Smith, Robert Smith of The Cure and Bjórk. The book depicts the last decade of her life with dark humour and cleareyed lucidity. The band travels all over Europe not to be successful, but to feed her debilitating habit. While she falls further into addiction, her peers succeed with the same substance issues. Addiction seemed to give male artists like Lou Reed or Brian Jones a more rock and roll, glamourous image. For women like Nico, it was a black stain against her, a failure of femininity.

What stays in the mind the most from these books, read so close together, is the view of the female addict, as written by sympathetic men. In these books she is a figure caught between an uncaring society and their own demons. The repetitive nature of addiction; the nausea, the purge, finding the funds for a binge, gives the reader a hypnotic insight into the life of a person stuck in their own stasis.

CREATIVE CORNER

Galway, April 2021

By Alice O’Donnell

Flowers bloom and burst, petals of pink and hues of spring scatter on westerly winds.

Salthill blooming: sunhats and glasses that shimmer like sun on a still ocean.

Buntings bud and sprout down Quay street. Tendrils looping and twisting as flags the colour of fresh flowers dance in a summer breeze.

By Sophia Hadef

Today in a marginal literary production and almost non-existent in terms of media advertising, poetry is nonetheless at the source of our literary history with the Homeric poems (The Iliad and the Odyssey), the Aeneid of Virgil and The Metamorphoses of Ovid. These four founding texts take the form of long poems.

From a poetic golden age, and from the medieval to the romantic: whether it is the 11th century with the song of gesture, the 16th century with the poets of the Pleiade or, later, of the romantic poets in the 18th century, the poetic genre was dominating the world of literature before the romantic form changed it all... Such a turnaround gave poetry a special place within contemporary literature: now an ancient art reputed to be tricky to access and yet a world of all possibilities.

Rather than attempting the impossible definition of modern poetry (as this genre is polymorphic and cannot be confined to this or that artistic flow), it seemed wiser for me to present to you some important figures of contemporary French-speaking poetry: an opportunity for all to enter gently into the complex works of some of my most beloved poets.

Here are two of my favourite poems that I have translated as best as I could. Paul Verlaine is my favourite poet, his art is so gloomy and moody but desperately beautiful.

My familiar dream, by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) published in Poèmes saturniens.

I often have this strange and penetrating dream Of an unknown woman, and whom I love, and who loves me And which is not, every time, not quite the same Not quite another, and loves me and understands me. Because she understands me, and my heart, transparent For her alone, alas! stop being a problem For her alone, and the wetness of my pale forehead, She alone knows how to refresh them, crying. Is she brunette, blonde or redhead? – I do not know. Her name ? I remember it is soft and loud Like those of the loved ones whom Life exiled. Her gaze is the same as the gaze of statues, And, for her voice, distant, and calm, and grave, she has The inflection of dear voices that have fallen silent.

Baudelaire is another favourite of mine, his style is unique and exquisite.

Meditation by Charles Baudelaire

Wise up, Sorrow. Calm down. You always lay claim to twilight. Well, here it is, brother, It descends. Obscurity settles over the town, bringing peace to one, worry to another.

The restless crowd, whipped on by pleasure— our dogged torturer—carry their hearts’ raw remorse with them as they serve their vapid leisure, while you, my Sorrow, drop by here, take my hand, and draw

me apart from them. We watch the dying years in faded gowns lean out from heaven’s balconies, as Regret rears, smiling, out of the deep dark where the dead ones march.

Dragging its long train—now a shroud—from its early light in the East, the sun goes to sleep under an arch. Listen, Sorrow, beloved, to the soft approach of

Night.

We are in this together.

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