In 1837 John Clare was admitted to High Beach Asylum, Epping Forest, where he remained until July 1841 when he escaped and walked 80 miles back home to Northborough, surviving by ‘eating grass by the roadside’. This experience was described in his prose piece Journey out of Essex. It is as vivid an account of absconding from an asylum as any. In A Knowable World, a new volume of poetry by Sarah Wardle, the author also describes in four vivid lines how she ‘fled the clinic,/escaping through a narrow bathroom window/shoeless…’ (p. ). Sarah Wardle's poetry is an act of courage, for she examines her own incarceration, madness, abnormal experiences and treatment with brutal yet endearing honesty. In ‘Unnatural justice’ she writes about her contact with the police:
They arrest you…
and six of them push you down on a mat and twist your arms behind your back, and that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is justice, as delivered by the Police so-called service (p. )
This poem recalls Robert Lowell's poem ‘Visitors’ in which he too describes his contact with the police, remarking ‘They are fat beyond the call of duty’, an indirect comment on the excesses that he experienced. Aside from Clare and Lowell, naturally, Wardle's poetry calls to mind other poets who like her have suffered psychiatric illnesses, including Elizabeth Jennings and Ivor Gurney.
There are a number of love poems here, addressed to her psychiatrist. In ‘Trust Core Values’ she writes
The consultant psychiatrist is on the ward. In his proximity, all is hope with the world…
even when love is not returned, since his Scottish blue eyes are a beacon, which simultaneously dispel and beckon (p. )
And in another poem ‘Psychiatrists Ask Questions’ she wrote
Just as Hume questioned if the sun won't rise, may I ask you, though you cannot reply due to your strict professionalism, what if there'd been light this side of heaven and I had been given another life? Might I have borne your bairns and been your wife (p. )
These poems remind us of the human dimension of mental illness, if we should need reminding. Wardle's gift is to have retained her observant eye and poetic sensibility when her reason and humours were assailed by illness. Her poems are worthy additions to the body of literature by writers speaking out of the experience of disquiet.
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