Description
Book SynopsisThe poems of Beyond take the reader back to the optimism Sarah Wardle found as a youth when she left home and became involved in the world. They show her venturing forth again, embracing life to find that all was never lost, as she finally overcomes obstacles to hope and allegations of disability she had almost allowed herself to think were insurmountable and true. The book traces her rediscovery of agency, direction, energy and love, and charts her course once more into the future. It chronicles her journey out of a care system into which she should never have let herself get deeper and deeper locked, and will give hope to others who wish to finance and negotiate their way out of this trap to take responsibility for their own lives. As in her previous collections, Fields Away, Score! and A Knowable World, the setting of many of these poems is London, but in these pages she gains an appreciation and understanding of the variety this city witnesses and offers as never before. Beyond is an affirming book: even as the flesh begins to age, the heart grows in courage and enthusiasm, reinvigorated by the realisation of the fresh possibilities of effort and resilience, confidence and self-belief, commitment and conviction, mutual trust and shared affection, and the work to be done before we sleep.
Trade Review'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.
