From the Purgatorial state of the epigraph and an opening sequence that riffs on the epic Voyage of St. Brendan the Abbot, through November's titular birds flitting in and out of existence, to the trawler that seems determined to find some sort of escape at the collection's finale, the poems examines various ghost-states on which life and death, light and dark hinge.Then there are encounters with Armstrong returning form the Moon, Virginia Woolf entering its tides, and a badger hinting at a hidden life up there; and there are moments of light, as a pig makes a tapestry, Ireland's forgotten handball alleys are recast in gold, and Lear grows antlers.
Like the eponymous fungus that appears to be regurgitated by the Earth herself after rain, fragments of invented folklore and mongrel histories have stained through from Breen's subconscious and come to bloom in a trio of poetic sequences.
In the opening section of this volume the west coast of Ireland is recast as a kind of Burroughsian Land of the Dead, with the ghost-lights from defunct lighthouses mixing with those of the automated in a sequence that slowly allows itself to be decoded.
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