Growing up in Jersey in the seventies, before I left to do American
Studies at Essex University, wasn't easy as an anomalous poet
living in a largely pedestrian, materialistic society. My escape
came by way of finding part--time employment with John Berger, part
of the Berger Paints family, who patented Prussian Blue, the first
modern synthetic pigment. John Berger, a wealthy, reclusive
aesthete and compulsive bibliophile and antiques hoarder, kept his
mother mummified in the living room of his property Tivoli, and my
unusual introduction to his eccentric, serendipitous lifestyle
forms the basis of this sequence. If arson had torched a property
of his, left as a ruin in Waterworks Valley, then the shell of the
house and the adjoining fields were used by a group of friends of
mine to do LSD, and to set up large speakers in the ruin through
which to play psychedelic music and the seminal rock albums of the
period. We called the place Psychedelic Meadow as it was regularly
coloured and shaped by acid. Paula Stratton's LSD documentation of
her experience of the drug became a seminal influence on my poetry.
When she committed suicide in the late seventies at a squat in
Chester Gate, Regent's Park a big light went out in me, and my poem
`Elegy for Paula Stratton' can be found in the collection This Is
how You Disappear, my book of elegies for dead friends. Nobody I
know has ever come more beautiful. (Jeremy Reed)
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