Book 6: Hazy days

The style here changes completely and becomes fragmented text’ as the poet with honesty and an emotionless intensity combined with minute attention to detail describes the vivid details of his ‘insanity’ which for this period manifests itself as appalling alcoholism.

No punches pulled here; no glamour, the poets writhes through epileptic fits and sleeps in his own vomit and piss. We are introduced in vivid detail to The Black Pig which squatted on the poet’s shoulder for as long as he can remember… we hear the pig taunting him and trying to undermine him, coaxing the poet to suicide.

The text herein is interspersed with fragments of literary references revealing how the poet, though at his lowest, is kept afloat by his learning and the literature of the great poets, playwrights and novelists…