Victorian Poems For The Mentally Ill

Some men do lose their minds to madness. Some do lose them to grief. The cruellest amongst them do lose them to both.Within these pages dwelleth one nameless man - and the most interior landscape a human soul can inhabit.He hath lost someone.What followeth is not a story of recovery. It is not a story of redemption. It is something rarer and more honest than either of those things - the full and unflinching account of a mind that loved completely, lost completely, and then went somewhere most minds do not return from.These poems do move through the phases of grief and into territories that have no name - only language, only image, only the sound of a man descending into the beautiful ruin of himself.Here is the chair that cannot be moved. Here is the music no other ear can hear. Here are the clocks wound against catastrophe. Here are the white roses that grow from frozen ground. Here is the silence that was prescribed as cure. Here is the name that learned to speak without its owner.And here, beneath all of it, is the question every soul who hath ever loved and lost will recognise the moment they do encounter it -What doth become of a person when the grief groweth larger than the person who carrieth it?These poems do not answer that question.They inhabit it.For those who have sat in the chair. For those who have wound the clocks. For those who have stood at the window listening to what no other soul could hear.This book was written for thee. Thou wert never alone in it.- Bear Blackwood

Pages: 180, Paperback, Independently published