Beyond - Wardle, Sarah

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Résumé :
Fourth collection of poems from Sarah Wardle with a focus on recovery from mental health problems.

Biographie:
Sarah Wardle was born in London in 1969. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College; Oxford, where she read Classics; and Sussex, where she read English. She won Poetry Review's new poet of the year award in 1999 and her first collection, Fields Away (Bloodaxe Books, 2003), was shortlisted for the Forward best first collection prize. Her second book, SCORE! (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), included some of the poems she broadcast while poet-in-residence for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, as well as the script of a film-poem, 'X: A Poetry Political Broadcast'. A Knowable World (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) followed her detainment in a Central London psychiatric hospital, and a new collection, Beyond, is due from Bloodaxe in 2014. She is a lecturer in poetry at Middlesex University and Morley College, and a FRSA.

'Sarah Wardle writes with great humanity and makes A Knowable World of the indignity, frustrations and fear of acute episodes of mental illness. That's how she manages to get her readers to empathise with all those in the community, both in and out of hospital, who live with the stigma of madness' - Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. 'Sarah Wardle's previous collection, Score!, took readers on an exuberant tour of Tottenham Hotspur FC, where she spent time as writer-in-residence. The change of tenor in A Knowable World, which charts the reel and plunge of the year she spent in a psychiatric facility receiving treatment for bipolar disorder, could hardly be more pronounced. These are, necessarily, poems of deep introspection, in which manic episodes, escape attempts and the baffling helplessness of incarceration are examined with agonised honesty... these are convincing poems, delivered with a tight formality that echoes the strictures under which Wardle found herself, while at the same time providing her with a means of control over a terrifyingly ungovernable situation' - Sarah Crown, Guardian. 'Wardle writes with a jauntiness and a grasp of the need to be clear; and courage, the sort that took on and put behind her the dark things and the different, writer's courage, which dares to be understood and judged' - Edward Pearce, Tribune.