Dear Alice

Narratives Of Madness

Tom Pow

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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 is 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 Salpetrière, 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 born.

"Out of fractured narratives of real pain, profound human distress and madness, as well as from records of the historic therapeutic quests of the Crichton doctors who tried - always inadequately, of course, how could it be otherwise? - to deal with, if not heal, this misery. Tom Pow has fashioned beautiful, human, deeply mysterious poems with a palpable sense of place, of landscape and time." Liz Lochhead