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BREAKING DOWN AND POETRY

BOOK BY MAUREEN OLIVER

REVIEW By Chris Barchard

Maureen Oliver is a person of many talents. Principally an artist, her paintings are featured on the Perceptions Forum website www.perceptionsforum.org.uk with links to her own website where more of her work is to be found. Her book, Breaking Down and Poetry, as its title suggests, is in two parts, each occupying about half of the book. The first part is a narrative with the subtitle "Diary of a Survivor". This covers just one year of Maureen's life whereas the poetry was written over a period of over forty years.

The diary is a very intense and vivid account of the events and experiences of somebody fighting tooth and nail to stay sane. It takes the reader through a roller coaster of sexual cruelty, mysticism, the occult, gay rights activism, creativity, alienation, human warmth and fracturing relationships. It is, in spite of the complexities and unrelenting pain it describes, very readable. There is a closely woven interplay between Maureen's inner and outer life. The "hallucinatory" experiences, voices and visions, are intimately related to real witchcraft as well as events in the outer world. At the same time she is having an uneasy relationship with the medical profession and hoping her malaise has a treatable physical cause. The book challenges the boundaries between religion, the occult and madness. She refers to pictures she has painted which illustrate some scenes in the story. At the end there is a short section summarising the sequence of events in the diary.

I found the poetry an easier read than the narrative, which was unexpected because poetry is often the more demanding of the two forms of writing. There is more in it than the simplicity of the expression might at first suggest. It explores a wealth of ideas in an almost epigrammatic way. There is an unrelenting logic to these poems and they all have a point to make. There is something ironical about the fact that the poetry is written from a more objective standpoint than the prose. But there is so much abstraction in the prose as to suggest that had it been given poetic expression there might have been difficulty in making sense of it. This book makes accessible an unusual and fascinating life.