Sebastian Barker in Conversation

At the British Library, 5 July 2005

GREVEL LINDOP: You've three books coming out within a year: a collection of poems, Damnatio Memoriae, in October 2004; what seems to me an unclassifiable book, The Matter of Europe, just out; and another volume of poems, The Erotics of God, due this autumn. Did you conceive of them as a trilogy?

SEBASTIAN BARKER: No. But I believe they are structured as a trilogy, with The Matter of Europe in the centre, Damnatio on the left and Erotics on the right. The fact is that all three books came out of the same series of studies which I'd been conducting for many years.

What kind of studies?

To do with the problem of references in writing poetry. From 1982 for about ten years I did a lot of research for a poem on Nietzsche, The Dream of Intelligence, which was published in 1992. There the references were easy, because it was essentially biographical in conception. When I'd finished that, I'd been through hell and I ended up in a serious and terrible crisis in which I was led by way of my wife and various friends to a Franciscan priest. He put me under instruction, and in the course of this instruction I staggered across a vast ...