Output details

A Knowable World

This book asks, ‘How can a poet make knowable, through possibilities offered by formal poetry, what it is like to be detained in a psychiatric hospital for a year with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder?’; ‘How can the full range of emotions of fear, frustration, love, despair, pity and compassion be conveyed?’; and ‘How can one chronicle the cast of characters, each with their tragic history, one encounters in an inner-city, state mental institution?’

Methods included using iambic pentameter and rhyme, at times this form echoing the author’s constraints at being detained and treated without consent, at others allowing her to search for unexpected rhymes and convey natural rhythms in counterpoint to a baseline beat, to transmit unrequited love, or pity for the homeless and suicides. Imagery, symbols, metaphors, similes and allusions were matched to content, mood and music to render life inside a psychiatric hospital as A Knowable World.

This book relates to the poet’s earlier books, Fields Away (2003), Score! (2005) and Beyond (2013) which together narrate an insider’s view of mental illness and its management. Form, especially iambic pentameter and the sonnet, remains an ongoing area for this poet’s inquiry and practice and has relevance for poets who wish to practice these devices and for academic critics. A distinctive feature is that many of these poems were written while the poet was acutely manic in hospital. The book makes an original contribution, within a canon that goes back to John Clare and Ivor Gurney, of poets writing from mental distress, and can be read alongside Lowell and Plath for its poetic examination of bipolar illness, by literary critics of madness, such as Gordon Claridge, theorists such as those from Freud to Foucault, social historians such as Roy Porter, and psychological creativity researchers like Anthony Storr.