Inside Out, published by Turas Press, is a book of deep scrutiny as well as unwavering compassion and courage. Outspoken and tender it’s a riveting narrative, a book you can’t put down once started even though it’s tough to read: a searing indictment of how people with disabilities are perceived.
The opening poem describes how the poet’s Functional Neurological Disorder suddenly manifests itself. As you read it, you experience the almost-drowning of the narrator:
I go under, and surface, flailing,
sea carries me out drags my weakness
like a trawler’s net takes fish.
Julie-ann’s sense of place is so vibrantyou feel yourself right there:
the beach full of miniatures
of people and parasols
until the shock of the ending prises you out of the sea and on to a street and you start to realise the true danger the narrator is facing.
I had never heard of FND beforehand so it was a shock to learn about this condition that creates our spasms and jerks, our tics and feints so that the poet is left Feeling like I’m in some parallel boarding school for ninnies. She is clearly giving a voice to other victims of this cruel condition while being brutally honest about herself too:
I understand the theory:
the present is all there is,
forget the past,
and of course the future’s unknown.
I just can’t live it.
The poems are divided into two sections, entitled In and Out. In is the main focus inside a special unit to which she gets deported to receive treatment. The unit she now finds herself in is for people with this condition and Julie-ann graphically gives us the sense of alienation through various means: the names of the many drugs she must submit herself to now there’s no hiding the kind of experimental chemical mixture we’ve become. We hear about mysterious scuffles of feet, the indignity of having to use cutlery with FND, the indecipherable patterns painted by other sufferers on stones decorating the edges of unkempt flower beds.
Characters are brought to life: Joy who has dementia, the Uno group, Nurse Kelly who brings her a fan, a man who runs round in his boxers, Rose who loves going on cruises but may not realise the gravity of her diagnosis, Stuart whose smile doesn’t work, Gina who has found some resolution as well as various staff such as Health Care Assistant, Nick, who thinks he is Ricky Gervais and Receptionist and even the owner of the hospital pat dog. Then there’s the inter-disciplinary group of specialists – neurologist, physiotherapist, OT, psychologist. The Night Duty Manager is a beautiful woman the narrator does not want to disappoint but the Unit Manager makes her feel she must be ironed out like a clean sheet for the sake of the institution. All are depicted as floundering in the face of FND’s unknowability but doing their best to help people with this terrible condition for which there is, as yet, no cure. It’s telling that the dining room is
too small to fit us, as if our little
crew of incurables were imposters.
The psychologist tells her You’re not mentally ill but wonders aloud about her father who cleared up after her grandmother’s murder but never seemed to notice or talk about what had happened. It’s a mystery briefly touched upon but is significant.
“You’re ill, and it’s complex”, he says
We’ll do what we can, but the brain…”
I know we don’t understand it.
It makes its move, we play dead.
The second section Out covers the immediate period after her discharge from the Unit.
I’m sitting in our garden looking crookedly at a sway of white roses… I can only look one way and shake incessantly. Every morning I hope I’ll feel like my old self. There’ll be change. This hour. This minute. Release. Hope is a dog with three legs. If a bird becomes sick it hides. One day I’ll look you straight in the eyes.
How other people view people with disabilities is shocking and becomes a focus. I try to imagine the courage it took to just walk down a shopping street:
I venture into town on my own,
a short way in among the shoppers
when Woman stops and turns,
her eyes dark pith, ‘You’re drunk!’
She’s dressed in baggy floral trousers,
padded jacket (fabric probably from Nepal).
I can’t find a retort, wobbling around
hands shaking. Not respectable.
My throat goes into a laryngospasm:
sentences form but cannot be spoken.
She looks me over as if I’m on sale,
the goods seriously defective…..
Despite the bleak subject, there is barely a page in which humour does not lighten the truth (except in this poem above). It’s an ability to step outside herself and observe, the poet’s eye, her sparks of life and of resilience that have the capacity to create, the passionate defiance which drove her to write this book and is evident when she reads from it now in public. Poetry seems to save her. As well as her mind-reader of a partner for whom a great homage is paid in FND Partner Job Description.
With no titles, the collection of poems reads very much like a novel-in-verse (or even almost a verse-play as there is so much inner and outer dialogue). It is absolutely an act of witness. Julie-ann has been able to give FND sufferers a voice because she is such an accomplished poet herself (with many awards to her name). Her use of line-breaks, razor-sharp observation, idiosyncratic syntactics, unsentimental perceptions that are lit with her unflagging sense of humour, use of dialogue, revealing asides shows that she is a poet at the height of her powers.
You can order it here
Rebecca Gethin 