The Book of Shannow

Paperback ‘Experimental’ novel. completed 1971. Nobody owns language, nobody invented it - or everybody did. Does - all the time. All possible styles are attempted - juxtaposed, invoking Eliot’s ‘surprise into a fresh sense of reality.’ Shannow is a mythic-magic landscape hung with lexical mobiles, hives & swarms of usages from the Irish & elsewhere. Hammy narrative is manfully eschewed, the free-standing scheme of Art is developing nicely when bloody old Life intervenes, makes a hames of the narrative, & turns out to be truer than the anyone could have suspected. As for the style; cf. William Carlos Williams - ‘why be afraid of imitating unless you’ve imitated the wrong thing?’ ‘Gusto’ says the organist in The Drums of Father Ned. About half this work has appeared in lit-mags Transatlantic Review, Ambit, Dublin Magazine, The Gorey Detail, etc. Also to be found in Collected Writings 1.