The Wings of Angels: A Memoir of Madness
Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Sandy Jeffs' poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying "shudders of intense fear". Yet in the midst of her rigours, she can access a voice both wild and funny. Sandy Jeffs' leavening sense of humour peoples her darkness with the sirens of the supermarket, a tinsel paradise and high-tech technicolour Armageddon. After all, God is only a word and angels, although mad, sing the wanderer into paradise.
2004 | ISBN 9781876756512 | Paperback | 200 x 132 mm | 120 pp
Reviews
'The Wings of Angels: A memoir of madness continues Sandy Jeffs’ articulation of the spirit and reality of the underworld of the mind that pushes itself into existence through her own schizophrenia … never romanticising madness, she writes with grit and candour of the dark confusion, the well of suffering inside mental illness.'
—Blue Dog
‘Read it because it will sweep you up and take you into another world. Read it because doing so will be enriching and challenging.’
—Susan Pepper, New Paradigm
‘Like Dante’s Inferno, these poems take us deeper and deeper into images of what can best be called hell … [this] poet’s ability to track such apocalyptic insights in coherent verse is a major achievement’
—Mandy Treagus, Lesbiana
‘This poetry is clear and concise with no smokescreens of pretence. It is directly from the unconscious yet nowhere is there babble. Always there is the driving force of intelligence, questioning the reality of delusion and the reality of the concrete. Always there is the powerful, simple, at times Biblical rhythm; a certainty of purpose; and a precision of craft.’
—Robyn Rowland