NIGREDO Kieran McGuigan

Nigredo takes its title from the first stage of the alchemical work: the blackening, when the old substance is broken down before anything new can be made. It is the first stage of the Great Work, when matter must rot before it can be remade. This book takes that process as its order of service. The 2022 pamphlet returns in black on black: Olivia Petrini's cover seals a skeleton and a raven in a glass flask, the title white as the shirt-front at a black-tie dinner.

It opens like a laboratory notebook, purifying a corpse and charting its decay. The descent that follows is steep and learned: Baudelaire's alchemy of sorrow, the Old English Ruin, Corbière's toad singing like a nightingale in the dirt, Skadi's winter, Mephistopheles at the church door, and a believer at prayer who cannot cast out his pagan poets. Halfway down, the glass cracks and South London pours in: a drink at the Catford Station Tavern, a ballad of the furtive dealer, a war fought through narcotic nights. Out of that dark comes the turn the old adepts promised: a new star logged by Han astronomers, the Magi's road to Bethlehem, St John's Gospel as a ballad, and a phoenix from the dead ash tree.