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Blood RelationsSANDY JEFFS
POETRY
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Bearing witness was unbearable Can such a story be true? Has memory been faithful? it is a journey fraught with the difficulties of memeory and its peculiar twists. It is also a journey where the arrival is to find strength and sanity in spite of the past. If nothing else, these poems are a testament to the survicval of the child and adult who became the poet and chronicler of what she witnessed.
The poems in this collection are an evocative documentation of the harrowing experiences of a child living in a hostile and unhappy home. The reader is shown the pain, the bitterness and the mixed emotions that accompany the experiences of growing up in a family torn apart by domestic violence and alcoholism. Memory is tested by remembering what one does not want to remember.
"Sandy Jeffs' poems inhabit the darkness at the heart of the dysfunctional family. The ravaged emotionality of these poems will speak to anyone who has felt its pain."- Doris Brett
"... a courageous and powerful journey ... Sandy Jeffs explores the dnamics including the secrecy, the unspeakable effects on the children and the healing."
- Patricia Esteal
"These poems speak with confronting directness of family lives deeply scarred by love distorted, by raging violence, alcohol, madness. It is as if only a langauge 'scoured' of artifice and sentimentality can encompass such experiences of Blood Relations, and chart the complex and fluctuating reactions of bewilderment, anger, guilt and compassion that mark indelibly these memories of survivor."
- Jennifer Struass
Sandy Jeffs is the author of award winning joint volume Poems from the Madhouse.
Poems from the Madhouse was awarded second prize in the FAW Anne Elder Award for Poetry 1993 and was commended in the 1994 Human Rights Award for Poetry.
This publication is assisted by the Australia Council, the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body
Territory: World All rights: Spinifex Press
Poetry, Violence, Survivors
