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Kith and Kin: experiences in mental health caring, edited by Barry Tebb,
Sixties Press, 27 Sefton Terrace, Leeds. LS11 7EL 60pp stapled £2.00 www.sixtiespress.co.uk

The Pain Clinic (parts 1 & 2) by Brenda Williams,
Sixties Press 56pp & 72pp both stapled £4.00 each

Maxine by Alice Lenkiewicz
35 Glebe Road, Skelmersdale, Lancashire. WN8 9JP prose & poems CD 18 tracks, 20 mins. no price given

I was a mental health nurse/carer for 14 years, and then only in working hours, and that was stressful enough. Mental health carers, the relations, are there day in day out for life, and with no prospect of release. These carers - parents, children, partners - are a people embattled.

   In Kith and Kin Barry Tebb's is one of 3 entries, and the only one, along with his ex-wife's, Brenda Williams, rendered in poetic form. Barry is the carer of his schizophrenic son, Sam; and this booklet is but part of his campaign for better treatment both for the mentally ill and for their carers.

   The second is comprised of excerpts from a father's blog. While the third seems to be the resume of a carer's life story. All 3's principal complaints concern post-fillers, often temporary, rather than active workers.

   Mental Health continues to be the cinderella service of the NHS. Fragmented into various 'Trusts', divided further into smaller units, some privately run (albeit funded by the state), with psychiatry being anyway a notoriously imprecise and subjective science, allied to a lack of training for lower echelon staff, the standard of care, as soon becomes evident here, is now a lottery. And I must confess myself a little in awe of the tragedy of these carers, their lives taken over by someone else's mental illness, and also of their devotion to the fundamentally unreliable person so stricken.

   The angst and self-examination (self-blame) of the affected family, the inward and backward looking that renders all self-involved; their becoming immersed in the language of psychiatry, making it no small wonder that they attach various of its labels to their own behaviours, reactions, responses; and the whole rotating around the one person, on the lookout all the while for signs and symptoms, guessing at causes and cures....

   Granted the typos, grammatical errors and missed insets are probably due to the spilling out of his various frustrations; but, and this is my usual gripe, to make this a flawless read the Sixties Press really could do with a hands-on editor other than author Barry Tebb. That said, one can only admire Barry's tenacity, both in his writing and publishing, and in his desire for justice in the treatment that his family deserves / needs.

   Brenda Williams' Enfield Sonnets contained some of the sonnets from The Pain Clinic. I reviewed that in #9 The Journal. Together these two Pain Clinic booklets contain 229 sonnets. That's 3,206 lines of poetry; which had to be an enormous task for the author, and one equally large for the reviewer. I dipped. Even then I was only occasionally drawn in, and then only when I recognised aspects from the above or before.

   Just to sustain the reader's interest, because there has to be a rhythmic sameness, if not tedium, in 229 sonnets, which became overkill in my case, I believe Brenda Williams would have been better served with a careful 'Selection', the full set of sonnets being saved for an on-demand special edition. Because, given the one form and the relentless subject matter, even read in conjunction with Kith and Kin, these 229 sonnets required a devotion way beyond this reviewer's.

   I approached Alice Lenkiewicz's CD expecting her to be a good reader. I am a poor listener. Print sticks with me. Voice usually flows over. Yet this CD, let's be clear, is not a simple reading. It opens with a few lift-chime bleeps to get the attention, and then, like the best chamber music, holds you with an urgent whisper. Another track has a wurlitzer backing, another is drum led, guitar another, a couple sung without any backing whatsoever. One is a near bathroom humming, more fierce whispers, a finger-pointing lecture, then comes an echo chamber, music interrupted... all serving to keep the attention from wandering. At one time I thought she was about to do an Elvis impersonation...

   Recorded while working on her novella, Adventures of Maxine, who is introduced as if by an excerpt from a video dating presentation, the novella seems to be the pieces delivered in whispers, which are coloured by [possibly] relevant songs and poems. As for subject matter... posterity via paintings figure, as does La Giacconda, and minerals, group sex...

   Having fully expected to be bored, what I instead found was myself listening to - several times - a 20 minute dramatic and intriguing entertainment.