Dear Alice: Narratives of Madness(Salt Modern Poets)

Tom Pow’s powerful new collection of poetry explores the imaginative legacy of a nineteenth-century lunatic asylum, the Crichton, drawing on the richly-documented history of the site. This remarkable book includes the sequence `Resistances’ gathered from female patients’ notes, but Pow brings many others within his compass: Nebuchadnezzar, Tom Thumb, Peter Pan, Charcot (Master of Salpetriere, the female asylum in Paris, `that great emporium of human misery’), all make an appearance, as do Freud and the Wolf Man. The Crichton Lunatic Asylum was at the forefront of the great nineteenth century European-wide `trade in lunacy’ – a period when old assurances were crumbling and our modern sense of the permeability of identity was being formed.

Table of Contents:
Prelude Inauguration Song for M Nebuchadnezzar in the Arboretum by Moonlight From Foucault: Two Tales and a Bedlam Ballad 1. Appetite 2. The Wise Farmer 3. Glass Tom Thumb Visits the Crichton Institution for Lunatics 23 February 1845 Nightwatch, 1842 The Last Vision of Angus McKay Field Notes The Buoy-Tree Tryst Landfall Charcot, Master of Salpetriere, Delivers his `Tuesday Lecture’ at the Crichton August 1879 The Arch of Hysteria Questions of Judgement Deirdre The Wolf Man at Crichton Hall, 1914 A Dream Before Battle Service Patient, 1916 Dear Alice Inmates Nurses Freud at the Crichton September 1939 The Gardeners Grass 1. The Weaver 2. The Iceman 3. Rashin-Coatie Ex-Laundry Girl, 1943 The Ghost Pitch Resistances 1. `each duty commands its own song’ 2. `because you dig the garden’ 3. `home has lost our touch’ 4. `I watch’ 5. `how many steps in any direction’ 6. `you make a bargain with the world’ 7. `to remain yourself deny yourself’ 8. `lost soul there is a world’ coda The Great Asylums of Scotland Notes Don Quixote

About the Author :
Tom Pow has won three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards for his poetry and one for his children’s writing. He has also written a travel book and written radio dramas. From 2001 to 2003 he was the first writer in residence at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and in 2005 was Poet in Residence at StAnza, Scotland’s Poetry Festival. He has taught in Edinburgh, London, Madrid and Dumfries. He teaches at Glasgow University, Crichton Campus in Dumfries, where he is a Senior Lecturer in creative writing and storytelling. In 2007, he received a Creative Scotland Award.

Review :
These are wonderfully lucid poems, full of humanity...Pow is regarded as one of Scotland's finest poets - and it shows in this brave collection. -- Harry Mead The Northern Echo With taut economy, turns of phrase arresting and compelling and an ear for weighing words, Pow's variety and empathy with his material are laudable, lyrical things. This is a poignant, subtle and humane book. -- Peggy Hughes Scotland on Sunday Pow is not constrained by the specialised material, including artworks and annual reports from the asylum. Rather, he combines this with his own fantasy narratives and contemporary observations...There is often a literal descriptive level at which these poems operate...but on the meta-level there is a text that raises far wider questions, many of them finding obvious echoes in today's news pages. -- Keith Bruce The Herald Behind the voices of observers, witnesses, inmates, wardens, and the stark or tender stories, it is the poet's own voice which finds exact words to let in light. -- J.B. Pick Markings Pow's vision is both lucid and complex, his treatments sympathetic but judicious, his executions the work of a very deft hand. What you encounter as a reader in Dear Alice is complicity to a point that never trespasses upon realism. Understanding, you are reminded, is only anything like truth within the cell walls of the Self. And madness has a logic very like your own. Read Dear Alice first because it's beautiful, but read it also to learn more about yourself. -- Stephen Lackaye The Edinburgh Review The elegance and sensitivity makes this sequence [Resistances] the highlight of Dear Alice. When it comes to describing insanity, poetry, it transpires, is a deeply sympathetic medium: the negotiation between words and meanings, the unexpected connections and curious juxtapositions; in life these are marks of madness, but in poetry, they become art. -- Sarah Crown The Times Literary Supplement