From Out of the Shadows—An Anthology of Poetry Williams, Brenda Jane (2002) Self-published, Scotland: 21pp, £4.50 (pamphlet). Copies are available from the author at 7 Rhodders Grove, Clackmannanshire FK12 5ER, Scotland for £4.50 (plus £1 for postage and packaging within the UK)

✍ Scribed by Marewa Glover

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 30 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1052-9284
• DOI: 10.1002/casp.710

✦ Synopsis

Book Review

From Out of the Shadows-An Anthology of Poetry WILLIAMS, BRENDA JANE (2002) Scotland: 21pp, £4.50 (pamphlet). Copies are available from the author at 7 Rhodders Grove, Clackmannanshire FK12 5ER, Scotland for £4.50 (plus £1 for postage and packaging within the UK)

To foreign ears even the places Brenda has lived sound poetic. Born in Sussex, studied Law at the University of Hull, moved to Lincoln, Oxford, Edinburgh and now settled in Clackmannanshire.

Clackmannanshire-what a wondrous sounding place. But, for Brenda it has been both a place of illness and a place of healing. It is here that Brenda was introduced to the creative arts and success as a poet.

The poems presented in From Out of the Shadows hint at the aetiology of Brenda's breakdown and show, too, the way back from those dark places mental illness takes us. Sometimes those pathways back are behavioural, sometimes cognitive. The cognitive is documented here in poetry.

Just One Man starts the collection and recalls in me my own experience of workplace bullying, how it can break us but how its impact is minimized by others. Whilst society focuses on domestic, sexual and street violence, the bully at work gets away with a mental terrorism that literally drives their victims crazy. It is an under-reported phenomenon which I can only applaud Brenda for tackling.

In the struggle to heal from abuse, we become more sensitive to the violence inflicted on others, to the violence around us and to the ways society supports and even depends on violence. A few poems in the collection reflect on the senselessness of war, Young Sweethearts, and the classic oxymoron of the 'peacekeeping force'. For Anare is written in memory of one life lost to the manipulations of just such political rhetoric. Oranges expands exploration of this tragic loss, no less a theft of life than life lost to murder.

Healing still, we come up from the black anger and confusion to make sense. In Humanity Dying the author ponders the source of violence. Is violence genetic or do we teach children bigotry and hate? Coming back in to the world of light, we feel hope again. Many of Brenda's poems have been written from this place, as the title suggests. She turns grief into gain in Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow and Angel where our precious dead become protectors who remain with us forever.

Finally in the healing process the anger is twisted away from one's own heart and fuels a passion to live, that is, to create, to change. Brenda pleads for peace in Wishes from an Angel. She pleads for understanding of mental illness and tries to educate through poems such as Murdoch the Monster and Broken. These poems empathize with the fear and helplessness the 'healthy' feel when confronted with friends changed by mental illness. We become the monsters people are afraid of. Meanwhile, they continue to live and work alongside the instigators of insanity and unknowingly collude through their isolation of us. Like Murdoch, we remain in purgatory, until some act of kindness or bravery, some so-called 'sane' act on our part triggers the world to re-inspect their judgement of us and extend at last the respect and belonging we did not deserve to lose in the first place.

From Out of the Shadows is one of those resources that helps break down the isolation that feeds mental illness. The poems are accessible as they are written in ordinary language. They are sincere grounded poems for people who have experienced mental illness and for people who want to better understand and support healing from mental illness.