Released 31st May, 2024 // 74 pages // 978-1-916938-18-2 // RRP £13.99
The Demon Tracts is a faithful reproduction of the loggbok of Norwegian-Shetlandic modernist poet, Kristján Norge who vanished from the Outer Hebridean Eilean a' Bháis (Isle of the Dead) in 1961. Part diary, part collage, its collaged contents betray a figure profoundly disturbed by the vicissitudes of island life. The loggbok entries are aligned with the lunar cycles of the new moon and full moon of 1961, beginning on July 11th (which opens this 'dorchar taibhse' or 'dark vision') and ending with the full moon on the 22nd of December. The loggbok concludes with a long, unedited poem: The Demon's Progress, which is surely a nod to The Rake's Progress and antithetical to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Crudely attached inserts include: a black and white plate of the Palatine Graffito depicting Christ as a crucified donkey; a fortune-telling card illustrated with a man wrestling a lion from the Grand jeu de Mlle Lenormand deck, Grimaud, France; a reconstructed cella using an Egyptian postcard of the Temple of Edfu; numerous typescripts and a 1950s image of wolves in a wood, possibly at Whipsnade zoo. Norge's handwritten scrawl is meticulously transcribed to reveal an arcane theatre of paranoia and self-betrayal akin to Nijinsky and Strindberg's own diaristic breakdowns. The Demon Tracts manifests out of Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire as microcosmic evidence of charred thinking and reduced selfhood via the invented ventriloquism of the 'Sluagh nam Marbh', a malign Highland tempest wind that seemingly drew Norge toward his death.
Praise for The Demon Tracts:
Engrossing. It is with the careful attention of an art conservator that MacGillivray rescues this work of shattered interiority by the late, obscure Norwegian-Shetlandic modernist poet, Kristján Norge. Going between Norge’s reproduced original and MacGillivray’s transposed rendering is surprisingly emotional: the raw intensity of the first disturbance, Norge’s wandering through the dark night of the soul, most of which is handwritten and in typescript, is carried over into lightness of white-spaced modern clarity, a kind of healing he seemed to have been in search of. MacGillivray, by this act of faithful transmission, conserves and frees Norge from the path of lunar delirium on which he had lost himself. Across unbridgeable space, The Demon Tracts, therefore, amounts to an adventurous collaboration between two Scotian kindreds, passing hand in hand through the whirligig of time.
— Ishion Hutchinson
A fitful and collaged poetics of deterioration from a seer who envisions the human core through the eye from the ear. The work astounds me.
— James Byrne
The force, travelling across stellar distances from sites where the choke of language is inadequate to a state of possession and delirium unmatched since Artaud, is absolute. Exploration of these pages cuts away slack flesh to reveal the bestial hunger of the alien for a time of natural magic. To risk it is to risk everything.
— Iain Sinclair
Through a dive into the literary wilderness of Kristján Norge, MacGillivray has found the poetics of an abandoned mind, giving it form and life. The Demon Tracts is an important book; it will change the face of literature and as such deserves to be read and revered by more than just the usual coterie of poetic insiders.
— U. G. Világos
Praise for Ravage: An Astonishment of Fire:
. . . clearly a major talent, fascinating work.
— Simon Critchley, philosopher, author and Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, USA
A toweringly original — multi-genre, documentary, polyphonic, heteroglossic — tour-de-force... in its unique and restless form and visionary imagination... No one has ever written like this.
— Steve Ely, Broken Sleep Books (Books of the Year 2023), on Ravage
Explosive work.
— Chris McCabe, Librarian, National Poetry Library, in The Bookseller (Autumn 2023 Highlights).
Very uncompromising and very unusually learned.
— Professor Ewan Fernie, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
ABOUT Kristján Norge:
Kristján Norge was born on Shetland in 1930. Something of an itinerant, he settled in Edinburgh before visiting Eilean a’ Bhàis in 1961 to continue his research into cartographic mnemonics. Three manuscripts have been recently uncovered: Optik: A History of Ghost (1950), Ravage (1961) and Until the Twilight Fails, an unpublished ms (unknown date), comprising a sìthean account which Norge apparently composed after his disappearance from Eilean a’ Bhàis, maintaining he had not died, but disappeared into a fairy mound.
