Barbara Ellis
Reviews
Splintering the Dark - Wendy French
Rockingham Press, 11 Musley Lane, Ware, Herts SG12 7EN £7.95
Wendy French introduces us to a world of darkness - the mirror image of lives lived by the unfortunate sufferers of mental illness with whom she worked for many years. Her delicacy of touch, empathy of feeling and expression, is conveyed by broken lines, as in 'The Concert Pianist': But now this chord/ Always this chord (she’d played over and over again)/ Haunts his waking dreams/ His sleeping hours. The first part of her book is devoted mainly to poems suggested by these broken lives, and the bravery displayed by these very disparate sufferers. The remainder of the poems, and the most significant, are workings of many of the fragments of Sappho into French’s thoughts and ideas, in creating new poems. These seem to be the work of the archetypal woman, stitching back together what has been broken or ripped apart and thus creating order and beauty where it seemed to be lost forever. Who picks up the pieces after disasters, war, illnesses, even death? But French does not exclude any member of the human race – she reminds us that we all have a duty to connect, one with another, whether it is by laying cables in a London street, or in a school in Dekeza, with the children from 'African Horizons', which ends:
I am a woman whose muted protest knits Mugabe/ Into the sleeve of a cashmere coat.
Wendy French introduces us to a world of darkness - the mirror image of lives lived by the unfortunate sufferers of mental illness with whom she worked for many years. Her delicacy of touch, empathy of feeling and expression, is conveyed by broken lines, as in 'The Concert Pianist': But now this chord/ Always this chord (she’d played over and over again)/ Haunts his waking dreams/ His sleeping hours. The first part of her book is devoted mainly to poems suggested by these broken lives, and the bravery displayed by these very disparate sufferers. The remainder of the poems, and the most significant, are workings of many of the fragments of Sappho into French’s thoughts and ideas, in creating new poems. These seem to be the work of the archetypal woman, stitching back together what has been broken or ripped apart and thus creating order and beauty where it seemed to be lost forever. Who picks up the pieces after disasters, war, illnesses, even death? But French does not exclude any member of the human race – she reminds us that we all have a duty to connect, one with another, whether it is by laying cables in a London street, or in a school in Dekeza, with the children from 'African Horizons', which ends:
I am a woman whose muted protest knits Mugabe/ Into the sleeve of a cashmere coat.
Page(s) 57-58
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