Black Cat Bone: A powerful hoodoo talisman, conferring success, invisibility and sexual power on its owner. It is highly prized because of the elaborate and dangerous nature of the rite by which it is obtained; cf. Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men for a vivid account of the ritual.
The sequence uses quotes from works by the Reverend Gary Davis and Charlie Patton, among others.
‘Princess’ and ‘Devil’s Eye’ are types of marble.
Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565: The epigraph here is translated from an inscription added to Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Skaters Before the Gate of St George some hundred years or so after the work was made. The original runs:
Aij leert hier aen dit beeldt, hoe wij ter wereldt rijen
En slibberen onsen wegh, d’een mal en d’anders wijs
Insomnia in Southern Illinois: This poem quotes freely from Edward Thomas’ ‘Out in the dark’, the first poem I ever got by heart.
Acknowledgements are due to Agenda, London Review of Books, Paris Review and The Times Literary Supplement.
‘The Fair Chase’ was commissioned by Scotland on Sunday for the anthology, Headshook. ‘Loved and Lost’ was commissioned by BBC Radio 3.