The Stone of Folly: Selected Poems

The Stone of Folly: in medieval and renaissance Europe there was a belief that irrational behaviour and madness was caused by a literal stone lodged in the brain. Removal of the stone would effect a cure. Of course no such stone exists. Images of this practice in northern European art are satirical. They mock both the quackery of the fake surgeons and the gullibility of the patients. They are warnings against the desire for quick fixes. The poems in this section are personal, secretive even. For the most part they derive from privileged encounters with workers and clients in the bent-reality world of psychiatry. Fear and perplexity around mental illness is always with us, just as it was to the medieval mind.The White Room is an imagined place of retreat for the mind. From here a selection of lyric poems have taken shape. These are the few that I have trusted to convey something of our deeper experiences, be they tragic, whimsical or surreal.