Pearl on the Law

This chapter looks at the poetry MacSweeney wrote during the 1990s, including the highly acclaimed Pearl and The Book of Demons along with the controversial and unpublished Blood Money. The chapter argues that Pearl should be viewed as the culmination of a sequence of writing begun with Black Torch in 1978, in which the character ‘Pearl’ makes her first appearance. I consider the critical reception of Pearl and the tendency to view it as a work of eco-poetry, and suggest that this interpretation is untenable. I go on to examine the sequence of 109 sonnets MacSweeney wrote about the child murderer Mary Bell, looking at the historical circumstance of the case and trial, and offer a new interpretation of Pearl in the light of this later work. I conclude by looking at MacSweeney’s reading of Sylvia Plath and the representation of parental authority in ‘Daddy Wants to Murder Me’ and a short poem inspired by Apollinaire.