The Figure of the Shaman in Contemporary British Poetry - Tapa dura

"Shamsad Mortuza's book explores contemporary British poetry from an unusual perspective. The idea of shamanism as a `sickness vocation,' whereby the poet gains access to the hidden underside of what makes society function, produces some fascinating results. Mortuza shows how important non-acknowledged realities have been to some of the most interesting and radical contemporary poets, such as Iain Sinclair, Maggie O'Sullivan and Brian Catling."- William Rowe, FBA, Professor of Poetics, Birkbeck College"The spectre haunting European rationality is the shaman, but one equipped with a book of critique rather than a book of spells. This study seeks out the best radical British poets to have embraced a range of shamanic strategies as a route out of modernity in order to re-enter it, transforming themselves and transforming it in their textual practice. It is brave and erudite, the first of its kind."- Robert Sheppard, Professor of Poetry and Poetics, Edge Hill University

This genealogical study focuses on the work of five contemporary British poets in order to locate them in a counter cultural tradition that is informed by strategic responses to `state terrorism.' It identifies some historical moments of ruptures, such as the persecution of the Celtic druids by the Romans, the killing of the Welsh bards by Edward I, the appropriation of bardic materials by Romantic poets writing in a post-French Revolution era, and the beatnik response to a post-World War bipolar world in order to contextualise and discuss the poets of British Poetry Revival writing under Thatcherism. Drawing on Mircea Eliade's notion of shamanism as `archaic techniques of ecstasy,' these poets have transformed Eliade's version of the shaman's `elective trauma' and enacted a critical rejection of totalitarian tools of the state and society. Categorised as the `Technicians of the Sacred' and the `Technicians of the Body' these shamanic poets include Iain Sinclair, Jeremy Prynne, Brian Catling, Barry MacSweeney, and Maggie O'Sullivan. Their poetic strategy is not a New Age fad; it rather investigates and inventories the `hidden' energies of past and present to wrest spirituality away from the confines of religion and politics, while embodying it in textual praxis.