Book Review: Postcards from the Asylum by Karen Knight

Karen Knight is one of Australia's most respected poets. She's won a wide number of awards and grants, and has been a writer in residence both in Australia and overseas. Her previous poetry book, Under the One Granite Roof, took on the subject matter of Walt Whitman's period on the battlefield during the U.S. Civil War. Her latest collection is closer to home. Postcards from the Asylum places itself in the heart of one of the least explored, most intense subject matters: incarceration in a mental hospital. In the microcosm of the universe this book inhabits, nothing is too black or bleak to laugh at. Laughter and wry objectivity form a talisman against a loss of self; pain and sorrow.

The poems chart Knight's own experiences at an inmate at the Royal Derwent Psychiatric Hospital in the late sixties. Although the reader feels the raw pain in the poet's voice, the pieces never sink into self-pity or sorrow. Most of the poems are brief, and the ironic lightness of Knight's voice coupled with the darkness of their subject matter, makes for powerful reading. Always there is hope and even joy at the fringes of the pain. There is romance in the hospital. There is black humour in such things as the girl who escaped from the hospital and painted everything she could green (including "don't jump" over the River Derwent). There is bribery and blackmail; basket weaving courses; odes, sonnets, and Paradelles; funky food queues; and both real and metaphorical flowers. It's intense, sometimes terrifying, and sometimes exuberant, but never does the work become despairing.

The 77 poems that make up this collection take their cue from the life around the poet: the tedium and torture of the daily routine; the madness of nurses and doctors; and the sanity and sorrow of the other people in the Hospital. Knight manages to capture that mingled sense of deep observation coupled with fear, boredom, and bravado. There's an inherent interest in Knight's personal experiences within the asylum, and all of the poetry contains a deep introspection that opens a thin sliver of light into the line between sanity and insanity. It's easy to wave away Knight's incarceration by saying that she was put there for her rebelliousness, but at the periphery of the poetry are people screaming:

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, Quark Soup, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, Cherished Pulse and She Wore Emerald Then. …

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