Tristan Crazy

The voices of the ten poems forming the sequence Tristan Crazy are Ken Smith's contemporary versions of the ancient miseries of love, betrayal, adultery. They echo the lovers in their three-cornered triangle: Mark, King of Cornwall, sends his servant Tristan to Ireland to fetch Isolde to his marriage bed; Tristan returns with her, the pair having fallen, as they say, 'in. love'; their affair continues long after her marriage to his master. So it goes. That they've drunk the love potion intended for her wedding night is merely the mirror of 'we couldn't help ourselves'. Their tupping, lies, guilt and old grief form a tale neither young nor old: what they endure as love Mark suffers as humiliation and betrayal. Tristan, exiled to Brittany and married to the other Isolde, is in his own turn lied to by her, and dies; Isolde of Cornwall dies beside him; the lovers are buried: sex, power and death are as ever each others' shady companions. Serve the buggers right. - SAM KENT

Tristan Crazy was the first Bloodaxe publication. The cover description was written by Ken Smith. The sequence was later reprinted in The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 (1982) and Collected Poems (2018).