The Mad Poet's Tea Party
but I am madness
and madness is me
it holds you captive
like a hapless bunny
caught in the headlights.
In this moving collection of poems, award-winning writer Sandy Jeffs shares her journey through madness over four decades, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the motley gathering of characters at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Both delightful and insightful, playful and serious, witty and whimsical, The Mad Poet’s Tea Party provides a devastating commentary on how our society treats those with mental illness from the perspective of someone who has experienced all its interventions. It captures in poetic form the enigmas and contradiction in madness.
2015 | ISBN 9781742199498 | Paperback | 210 x 148 mm | 82 pp
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
The Madwoman in this Poem
Sensing Madness
Congratulations
Medicated
Cold Chemical Comfort
Marinade
Unquiet Mind
Of Shifting Images & Auras
Acrostic #1
Seeing the Insane
Waging War
Alice in Larundel Land
The Dark Hours
Dangling
Ceaseless Night
The Witching Hour
The Burrow
Mental Rape
Occupy My Mind
Caring for My Mind
Therapy: Prices Update
Passover
To Melancholia
Into the Dark Wood
The Mad Poet’s Tea Party
Acrostic #2
Seroquelled
SuperMadwoman
I Peeped
How?
Solitude
Awakening
Spirals
McMadness
I Called You Mad
There’s Something Dead in My House
When They Came to Get You
I am Not the Same Person
Surgery of the Soul
Threadbare
Calculating the Cost
Suicide
Staying Alive
To Be or Not To Be
Beggar
Housemate
Downsizing
The Social Worker
Where is the Rage?
The Sanity App
Done to Death
A Life
Reviews
Sandy is one of my all-time favourite poets and I admire her talent and courage immensely. For as Sandy puts it in “Dangling” ‘we dangle from a thread of sanity while madness snaps at our heels’ but it hasn’t stopped her from offering the very best of herself and we are the richer for her persistence over the years.
—Jean Taylor, Sinister Wisdom
It’s clear poetry is Jeffs’s world; it permeates ordinary human existence, doing its best to withstand insanity and capitalism.
—Michael Farrell, The Australian
Over six collections and a memoir, Melbourne poet Sandy Jeffs, has developed a considerable track record as an "insider" spokesperson for the mentally ill. She has battled schizophrenia and other disorders since 1976, From 1994, with her first book, Poems from the Madhouse, Jeffs has used poetry to provide a graphic insight into her situation and that of thousands of others enduring comparable problems.
—Geoff Page, Sydney Morning Herald
Parts will make you cry... It's a clever read. However it is our privileged entry into the halls of madness-our chaperone a dexterous poet, clearly in command of her language-that makes it an unforgettable one.
—Cherie Moselen, Warrandyte Diary
The Mad Poet's Tea Party puts it all on the table...it is the assertion of a poet who knows that 'every mad cloud has a sane lining', and that she can still be a renowned writer with a mental illness
—Alicia Bee, The Australian Writer
If you believe that 'blessed are the cracked for they let in the light', then double-blessed is Sandy because she lets in the funny too.
—Andrew Denton
I never imagined describing madness could be so rich, so vivid and so full of humour – Sandy’s words make me want to dance.
—Meryl Tankard, choreographer and director for stage and film
Sandy Jeffs lives her art and opens up her unique soul to us. Her writing makes us laugh, enlightens and moves us with her bewitching words. This book is a treasure and testament to her wonderful gift.
—Elena Kats-Chernin, award-winning composer