Here is the real story of the cult figure known as one of modern music's true innovators. Following Don Van Vliet's death, Mike Barnes reassesses his legacy through new interview material and with reference to reports and eulogies that appeared in the media. The author also puts Van Vliet's reclusiveness over the last two decades in context, now that it has been officially revealed that he was suffering from MS (his friends and representatives had always denied that he had a long term illness). A unique in-depth look at a unique artist.

In this moving, deeply humane and surprisingly uplifting book, poet Mike Barnes shows that a side of dementia that is almost entirely missing from public discussions of their condition: `All people with dementia, and some of them strikingly, show depths of sensitive awareness, resilience rising to heroism, and a capacity for joyful relatedness.' Be With balances candour about the devastations of dementia with insights into its paradoxical and indeed often uncanny enhancements of life, the ways in which it sometimes calls forth capacities long buried by the defences of full cognition. Fiercely alive, marked by a sharp, unerring eye for detail and a wonderful way with metaphors, Be With encourages us to focus on fellowship and accurate witness: to simply be with who, and what, is actually before us.

A poet recounts his experience with madness and explores the relationship between apprehension and imagination. In the summer of 1977, standing on a roadside somewhere between Dachau and Munich, twenty-two-year-old Mike Barnes experienced the dawning of the psychic break he’d been anticipating almost all his life. “Times over the years when I have tried to describe what followed,” he writes of that moment, “it has always come out wrong.” In this finely wrought, deeply intelligent memoir of madness, its antecedents and its aftermath, Barnes reconstructs instead what led him to that moment and offers with his characteristic generosity and candor the captivating account of a mind restlessly aware of itself.

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NELSON BALL PRIZE In a dark time, wrote Theodore Roethke, the eye begins to see--and with Braille Rainbow, Mike Barnes reveals both darkness and the light that shines beyond it. Beginning with a suite of poems completed before and immediately following his admission to a psychiatric unit as a young man, Barnes's quiet lyricism and formal sensitivity capture those moments of perception that remind us how to see. Please note that the text of this book is not produced in braille.

Written between one January and the next, A Thaw Foretold is a passionate exploration of themes that are as timeless and recurrent as the seasons. In language that is precisely vivid and particular, embracing both colloquial directness and formal elegance, the poems confront the elementals of love, and loss, mortality and remembrance. Longing and desolation and dread are powerfully evoked, but so, in counterpoint, are the consolations of shared happiness, comfort and hope. The suspension and tension implied by the title -- the pomise of flowing water that murmurs beneath ice -- gives the sequence of poems unity as well as dynamic and propulsive momentum. The result is a collecton that is richly tetured, emotionally and intellectually resonant, and thoroughly compelling.