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Pagdin\u2019s pamphlet, Caldbeck <\/em>presents poems which are unflinching in focus, and confidently varied in form, as she explores her experience of sudden postnatal psychosis. The poems are thoughtfully arranged to trace the emotional and physical demands of her experiences from early concerns for the health of her unborn child, through to her time in, and beyond Caldbeck psychiatric ward.<\/p>\n The pamphlet begins with a \u2018Definition of Love\u2019. Compressed meaning is introduced in the opening poem through a reference to related Old English words for \u2018leave\u2019 and \u2018lief\u2019, and notions of what is left, abandoned or desired run through the collection. This is followed by the first definition of the \u2018Verbal Noun:\u00a0 something known by its actions\u2019: a significant first definition, given the lack of agency and control Pagdin later recounts.\u00a0 Within a few lines we have: \u2018the press of breath against a diver\u2019s chest\u2026\u2019. The image is unexpected, and Pagdin moves deftly from lighter, airier images to concluding lines of love like \u2018bulbs at night\u2026warm and sure; \/rubbed roots which intertwine in earth.\u2019\u00a0 After this earthy reassurance, she concludes with a sharp caesura and \u2018Anonym: heartache.\u2019\u00a0 The controlled lineation and language keep the poem clear of sentimentality, and this sets the tone for the pamphlet.<\/p>\n Pagdin presents the dislocating nature of her experience through imagery, but also through the lens she offers in the centrally placed \u2018The Radio Times\u2019, where she presents a series of distortions, a world in which sounds \u2018Cannot be switched off\u2019, and \u2018wedding rings are 50p\u2019: everything is too intense; nothing has real value.\u00a0 The facing page contains two assured, tautly one-line poems which mirror each other, conveying the alienating, disabling nature of the psychosis.<\/p>\n Pagdin emerges from her journey with a haiku in praise of Japanese pots which are \u2018more valuable cracked.\u2019 The concluding \u2018A Definition of Hope\u2019 contrasts earlier images: from the heavier, brutal sense of hopelessness in \u2018Crista\u2019, where she states that by the fourth week she was \u2018Finally broken \u2013 as a horse is broken in\u2014\u2018 to the fragile birth of a butterfly with \u2018 its wings still budded and moist\u2019. The details are raw and precise, and hope shimmers uncertain, juxtaposed against \u2018Antonym: nothing.\u2019 It is a fitting, sober end-note for a pamphlet which explores a devastating experience with grace, and with tempered, spare diction.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n On Whom the Rain Comes Down<\/strong> People do say never to touch a tent They said our baby could have Downs, They said our baby might have infantile hypotonia, <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jenny Pagdin<\/strong> studied BA English at Oxford University and MA Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She lives with her husband and son in Norfolk where she works as a charity fundraiser. Her first pamphlet, Caldbeck<\/em>, with Eyewear Publishing, was shortlisted for the Mslexia pamphlet competition (2017) and selected by the Poetry Book Society (2018). She won the Caf\u00e9 Writers Norfolk prize 2018.<\/p>\n
\nTitle from Thomas Hardy’s ‘An Autumn Rain-Scene’<\/em><\/p>\n
\nthat’s heavy with water;
\nI barely even knew a woman could
\nget ill and hurt her child.<\/p>\n
\nfor six months our odds were penciled on the wardrobe,
\nwhile my auntie, cousins, friends,
\nsuccumbed to cancers, fraud or death.<\/p>\n
\nthen he fainted and wouldn’t come round,
\nI was sick and fainted and was sick, sick, sick
\nand still it rained down, crosshatching the sky.<\/p>\n