Notes

1] This poem "won the Prize in the Scottish Open International Poetry competition in 2000, though it was written in 1987 after a psychiatrist, Dr Brion Sweeney, said it might be therapeutic to write some of my feelings down about hospitals and hospital treatments. The poem came out in sonnet form, because the form carried me along." (poet's note).

11] bad cess: an Anglo-Irish expression meaning "bad luck."

31] fetter: see "infirmary screw" (6.vi).

34] GP: General Practitioner, family doctor.

38] gumption: personal "drive."

40] ECT: electro-convulsive therapy, electric shock treatment, a routine pre-1960 way of managing mental disorders, use of which is still prevalent today.

47] scout: orderly, watchman.

54] dial: face (after the "face" of a clock or watch).

75] ESB: Electricity Supply Board (Ireland power utility).

76] hock: debt.

77] VD: venerial disease.

81] The hymn "Rock of Ages," by Augustus Montague Toplady, addresses Jesus as it opens, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, / Let me hide myself in Thee!"

92] mystics: especially St. John of the Cross (1542-91), who authored Dark Night of the Soul.

100] mendacity: habitual lying. feria: fair.

104] Wisteria: climbing blue-flowering shrub.

105] aspidistra: common household pot plant.

109] Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austrian psychiatrist, the founder of psychoanalysis, who coined the phrase "Oedipus complex" for what he believed to be a common but repressed human desire to commit incest. Freud’s theories have now been discredited by Richard Webster in his book Why Freud was Wrong (1996; poet's note).

112] Carl Jung (1875–1961), Swiss founder of analytical psychology, who proposed the existence of a collective unconscious that expressed itself in myth and archetype.

126] Skinner: B. F. Skinner (1904-90), founder of behaviorism, a form of psychology that used conditioning to produce well-adjusted individuals. His experiments were based on the behavior of rats.

138] the bell: one of Pavlov’s theories influenced Skinner's stimulus-response experiments—this recorded the flow of saliva in dog when feeding was preceded by a rung bell. It reduced everyone’s behaviour to this idea.

139] Reich: Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), an Austrian psychologist who proposed a novel form of energy, the orgone, that contributed to health and sexual potency. He died in a US prison where he was serving a two-year sentence for selling orgone accumulators in defiance of a prohibition by the Food and Drug Administration.

153] Szasz: Thomas Szasz (1920-), a professor emeritus of psychology at the State University of New York in Syracuse, published The Myth of Mental Illness in 1960 and has worked for decades to assert the rights of people judged mentally ill, as with schizophrenia, and consequently institutionalized, tortured with electric and insulin shock therapy, and condemned to social deaths before their bodies died.

156] aisy: easy.

159] kith: kin, people.

166] Fromm: Erich Fromm (1900-80), German-American social psychologist.

175] onyx: jewelery, a "form of chalcedony consisting of plane layers of different colours" (OED).

180] Laing: R. D. Laing (1927-89), Scottish psychologist who argued that the so-called delusionary thoughts and ideas of the mentally ill ought to be accepted as truthful, authentic accounts of individual experience.

183] squidgen: little bit.

199] lift: elevator.

213] snuggly: woven shawl (not in OED either as a noun or in that sense).

226] snooker: a billiard game with elements of pool and pyramids.

227] Pooka: Irish folk evil animal spirit.

230] penile: penis-like.

232] Phallocracy: male society.

259] torchon: dish-cloth.

262] "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" (Shakespeare).

273] nursery rhyme: "Mary, Mary, quite contrary, / How does your garden grow?"

275] seen: "seem", a misprint in the 2002 edition.

289] bartered bride: the title of a comic opera by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.

291] no suture: a baby whose brain lacks sutures, which are channels of soft tissue that separate six cranial bone plates, suffers from craniosynostosis, which prevents the normal growth of the brain.

295] counterpane: bedcover (poet's note).

297] racket: din. cacophony: loud discordant noise.

310] clime: atmosphere.

319] "Here, what is beautiful is not so in the eyes of the narrator" (poet's note). An allusion to one of Grimm's fairy tales, the story of Rapunzel, a maiden imprisoned in a tower who let down her hair to enable an enchantress, and later her prince, to climb up to her. When the enchantress found out that Rapunzel was with child by the prince, she cut off the maiden's hair and cast her into the wilderness.

323] unsalutary: unhealthy.

330] spree: "wild splurge, i.e., shopping spree, from the Irish word for `fun'" (poet's note).

335] To the mad person, wrong and right can be confused.

336] Gath: ancient city in Israel, the home of Goliath.

340] Plath: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), an American poet, married to British poet laureate Ted Hughes, and the author of a semi-autobiographical work The Bell Jar, published the year she committed suicide. She also had undergone electric shock treatment. Rowley has written an essay on this, published in Thumbscrew (Oxford, 1995).

346] streeling: straggling, disorganized.

361] ruth: pity (cf. the more familiar `ruthless').

364] couth: known.

370] Bob of Duluth: Bob Dylan (1941-), enormously popular and commercially successful American folk song writer.

373] poetry is paid no fee: “poetry has no fee” in 2002.

386] drey: unwheeled cart.

409] Erse: the Irish tongue.

412] fee: pay.

416] cod: joke.

419] Jesus asked a demon that possessed a man in the country of the Gadarenes, "What is thy name?", and the demon replied, "My name is Legion: for we are many" (Mark 5.9). It was long thought that mental illness was because of demonic possession.

426] A country, east of Eden, to which Cain was exiled after murdering his brother Abel (Genesis 4:16).

435] Imagist poets such as the Americans Hilda Dolittle ("H.D.") and Ezra Pound sought to reduce poems to their essentials. Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is typical:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

441] Dr. Faustus, the subject of plays by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe, sold his soul to the Devil for knowledge, power, and love that turned out, in the long run, to be comparatively worthless.

445] herstory: the feminist's personal "history," a term coined by Robin Morgan in 1970.

450] truck / With: do business with.

451] ruck: controversy.

453] schmuck: fool.

454] pipped: gave birth. vroom: "The roaring noise of a motor vehicle accelerating or travelling at speed" (OED).

462] gut-lancer: a newly coined word (a knife's drawing out of a person's guts in what used to be the most brutal form of execution, hanging, drawing, and quartering).

464] chancer: risk-taker.

466] necromancer: one who raises the dead by magic.

467] currish: snarling like a bad-tempered dog.

470] pop-eye stare: fixed gaze so intense that the eye appears to protrude or start out.

471] demurrage: hesitating, refusing to take action.

480] Attila the Hun (406-53), who invaded Europe from the east and was well-known for his cruelty in war.

481] a priori: from the very start.

485] Tory: British political conservative, traditionally representing the interests of the landed gentry, nobility, and monarch. Here, "a conservative who believes that life and its strife will never change and so will give up" (poet's note).

492] rota: rotation of duties among a roster of employees, roster.

494] wangle: somehow get, as by devious means.

496] mangle: a mechanical wringer of wet clothes in a laundry.

506] nox: night (Latin). "Some Latin writers, like Catullus, believed that death was nox perpetua, or eternal darkness" (poet's note).

517] canonic: dialectical systematizing.

525] catatonic: in a state of stupor.

531] "Being immortal was considered a good, but what if one ends up with the wrong crowd? " (poet's note).

539] ineluctable: inescapable. A favourite word of the self-exiled Irish writer, James Joyce.

544] used to pray: "used pray" in 2002.

548] shard: broken fragment (of pottery).

559] "The mental hospital often enables research experiments" (poet's note).

560] racket: a real fuss.

561] Kew: an allusion to Richmond Royal Hospital near Kew in southwest London, which specializes in psychiatry.

562] in a bracket: of the same sort as …

564] placket: female underskirt.

565] infirmary screw: collar to restrain the patient.

568] tacket: nail.

569] clew: guide to a maze.

570] thole: endure.

573] shrive: make confession.

577] mercy-meat: gift-food, charity, good will.

579] compleat: after the manner of books, e.g., compleat gourmet, etc.

584] out of kelter: in no good spirits, in a bad way.

601] mater: mother. matrix: womb.

607] bong: sound out loudly, like a bell.

625] Synapses: the interfaces between neurons.

629] gibbous: hunch-backed.

664] purled: "pleat or frill like a ruff; to frill the edge of" (OED, "purl," v. 1). Purl and plain are knitting stitches which often go together in a pattern.

669] riled: angered.

672] Britannica: the encyclopedia.

678] charactery: (pharmaceutical) symbols, an echo of Keats:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
` Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;

680] Drug companies put holograms on the packaging of pills to foil counterfeiting.

682] palliative: pain-killer, temporary reliever of symptoms.

Other poems by Rosemarie Rowley