To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last

[sovay]

My poem "Every Night and All" has been accepted by Nightmare Magazine. It is a poem of plague as much as the underworld; the title comes from the refrain of the "Lyke-Wake Dirge," which I learned as a child from the singing of Buffy Sainte-Marie. It has threaded through my work ever since. (It plays a fleeting but central role in "The Boatman's Cure.") Years later I discovered she was singing a variation on the classical arrangement by Benjamin Britten, but as much as I admire the eerie lilt of Peter Pears' famously dry white tenor, less like the living waking the dead than one ghost calling another down, the old sistrum jangle behind Sainte-Marie terrified me in childhood and no amount of strings and horns can change that even now.

Comments

[ashlyme]

*She does sound like the earth. You believe she knows what's under it.*

If you'd played this to me without telling me who it was, I'd have assumed an older Briton, rather than a young indigenous Canadian. I've met geology I could imagine sounding like this. *shivers*

*Hee! Tell him I said hi.*

He says hello back. I'm probably going to the same hell as Kenneth Williams for this, but Mr Pears tastes quite nice.

(Must investigate some Britten.)