A smell my nose is now hunting - Review of Did You Get Married To Her When I Was In The Mental Hospital? by Abigail George

Dear Abigail

Your story, Did You Get Married To Her When I Was In The Mental Hospital? (published by ZamaShort) is not meant to be an easy read. I know it took it out of you to write it, and I am not surprised by that. While I read it, I felt almost as if I were being confronted with the life that might have been mine, had it not been for … what? The two facts of your childhood that distinguish your life and mine most significantly, in my opinion, are, firstly, the fact that you were burdened with the stigma of mental illness. As you write in the 24^th of a total of 25 passages, or prose stanzas, that make up this work: “It was my destiny to call stigma a companion” (The Sea.) Oh, I empathise with you saying how tired you are of the illness:

  

I am tired of being mentally ill, this chronic sickness, this flame, the powers that be. I watch it burn between my fingers. It tastes of Palestine. Cold stone turned into rubble. Make it go away but it doesn’t go away. (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.)

 

I was diagnosed with mental illness in my 30s, but I was compelled fiercely to refuse the stigma, because my father told me in no uncertain terms to right myself, he did not want to, or could not, pay for more sessions with the psychiatrist. (I don’t have medical aid, you see.) And I had a three-year-old child to look after. So, I weaned myself gradually off the meds I was told I’d need to take for life, and focused instead, fully, on having to mother, and having to be a wife. You lament that those age-old, anonymous roles weren’t for you – “I could never be wife material […] I could never raise children. Oh, madwomen couldn’t do that” (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.) These roles can indeed help, can ground us – as you, too, I think, are finding, by having to look after, to mother, to care for, your two-year-old niece, and your elderly, vulnerable father – ?

 

But back to the illness with which you were loaded at such a young age, as we discover in your bio that precedes your story. As I see it, this load was weirdly and unwillingly (or unwittingly?) linked into the thing you state unequivocally saved you: language, poetry. I will say more to try to explain what I mean by this, but before I do that, I want to name the second significant event that for me distinguishes your and my destinies in, I hope, mutually instructive ways: the fact that both your parents supported and encouraged your writerly gift. We learn from your bio that your father proofread your drafts when you were in your twenties and thirties, and that your mother “recognised my talent for writing early on” and bought you a typewriter, first a manual and then an electric one, wow! And this happened even though she “makes it a point never to read anything I have written”, preferring Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steele novels. Well, as Richard Bach famously observed: “Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” Still, your brother, though far from filled with joy over your life, as you describe him, nevertheless published your first book. The bitter contradictions life forces us to accept! And so:

 

Writing was a sign from God […] it gave me a reason to live, a purpose and I could heal myself, and others. (From your Bio)

 

Despite the hatred and the absence of peace around you, despite the sickness inherent in the social structures of school and the nuclear family, despite the fact that your family members, teachers and peers “had no time” for you and “severely bullied” you, “leaving [you] breathless, or half deranged with all the negativity in [your] environment”, you found “a sea of wildflowers” in poetry, “a bed on which [you] could rest the vessel of [your] body.” (From your Bio) That is beautiful. The same motif serves your experience of reading: Reading, you write in Eating Rice and Potatoes with some Steadfast Patience, “is for the wildflowers in our imagination to blossom”.

You begin your story addressing your First Love. Later, in Don’t You Forget About Me, Pinky Swear Promise Me, R., you address your toddler niece, then, in We Need to Discuss Crystal Meth, Struggle, the Healer, and Forgiveness, it’s your brother you’re talking to. And in This is My Convent, you talk directly to Anne Sexton. And then, in Poem for Gaza, Songs for Me, you revert to your First Love, O. Have I got that right? Seeking a hearing, a connection, a conversation – just like any ordinary woman, like any social creature.

I like the way each of your passages, your prose stanzas, begins with a sentence full of capitals, there is something stately and leonine about that.

 

Years in Summer Days.

Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please.

I mean, it reminds me of the Lion in Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, the way you make the words march in, heads held high, bringing that energy of the Unquestionable Arrival of the Sovereign. And that allows, later, for the “vessel of [your] body” to claim her vulnerability in the ‘aquarium’ of your suffering, to announce:

 

I Don’t Know How to Start.

Or:   

The Gap Between Symbol and Reality. (The final passage.)

 

… where the capitals seem to submerge the reader, with equal grandeur, but no longer breathing with lungs, there is almost a having to hold the breath as you write that:

 

The sea began screaming at me.

And:

I held the blueprint of my wound and stopped breathing.

(Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown.)

Henry Lombard calls your story “claustrophobic” in his comment, and remarks that you “prove” writing to be “a holy act of reclamation”. That is what I want to dwell on now, I mean the role of literary language and its implicatedness, as I see it, in illness, and in “the brutality” which “was the same”, whether you were at home reading a magazine “whose words hurt [your] eyes”, and “A refugee camp falls out”; or whether you were in Israel, which you discovered while your mother watered the garden, in Finding Years in Summer Days, or whether Netanyahu speaks, in Gaza is not Dead, and you

 

squeeze blood out of stones in a refugee camp and wash soiled garments in the sea. The aroma of death, the rubbish, and decay, I need to get it off my hands. (Forgiven, but not Forgotten, it Doesn’t Matter you see.)

 

Now you are Lady Macbeth, and all of humanity’s horrors are yours to cleanse. And the reader is with you and it’s awful.

So, what is happening here, the way I see it, is that language is dumping itself into you, into us, via an unchecked flow of sounds and images. You write that “when it appears in the newspaper it has a beating heart” (Finding Years in Summer Days) and there is this sense of the limitlessness, the continuous increment, the boundarylessness, that dreadful slipperiness of the medium you use:

 

I can’t throw out my feminine energies with the past, nor with the pasta water. (Octopus Flowers in the Dark.)

Or:

Nothing grows inside this garden except the dead bodies of children, and snails who were somehow not involved in the Palestinian struggle. (Silence.)

And:

These pills fill me or are they peas? (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the

Ambulance Chasers.)

 

The snails are actually comical in their non-involvement, a last, languid bastion of feet and feelers in Eden. Even the pills and the peas bring in the curl of a question mark, or is it a shy smile, after their shared p’s – ? But when you “fry the ham in the pan” (A New Love), I accidentally read “harm” for “ham”; and in This is My Convent I see you eat “my friend egg”, and only afterwards realise it’s a perfectly regular “fried egg”. I mean, what is happening is that the language is uncontained, or should that be untamed? The verbal stew of torment is bewildering, the fine details are so awfully human, again I gasp for breath, asking, where is reality, where is the realness of the animal I am, my connection to the wind? I want to run away and breathe an air free of language. Maybe on the mountain, who “have ears and a kind of feminine energy” (Finding Years in Summer Days)? I have to admit that I don’t have the tenacity, I don’t have your ability to live this remarkable destiny of showing the world that the word was NOT God, the word was far, far too HUMAN!

The truth reveals itself. Unlike your mother, who eats an apple “in tiny bite-sized pieces” (Octopus Flowers in the Dark), you “tear the apple apart with [your] teeth” and “deconstruct [dried fruit] on [your] tongue” (A New Love), and “Gaza falls like the neck of a wildflower falls” (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.)

So, you are Eve, abandoned by Adam to a fallen Eden, eating the whole apple by herself, teaching us that we have not survived the Age of Permissiveness, where the sea is language and, as female writers, we inhabit an ocean of suicidal female poets: “Ingrid Jonker’s sea” (Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown). Who can deny this fact? Yet you crave for your mother to SAY she loves you, her gifts of actions are NOT enough (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts). I was the same, exactly so, where I likewise craved to hear words from my parents that I eventually learned to accept could not and still cannot be articulated by the soft animal that is love. Is that why the following paragraph touches me so deeply?

 

My spirit has evolved because I loved you. On lonely nights I gather this fact of life to myself. […] What is this observation that challenges me to overcome my suffering? (I Don’t Know How to Start.)

 

You write, “I don’t know how to end this on a positive note, so I will end here” (I Don’t Know How to Start) – words which must surely move even the most coolly detached of readers.

And then!

Then you ask. You ask with a directness that jumps beyond words, it’s the gentle curiosity of a wild animal. Cautious, but fearless. The Gentle Curiosity of Woman. You jump, no, you pounce straight to the heart of matter (not “the matter”, just “matter”):

 

As a poet, as an individual, whose joy matters most to you? What is your response to loneliness?

 

Oh, Abigail, thank you for those questions! I want to do nothing more than respond. I want you to know, and I want myself to know that, As a Poet, As an Individual, it is The Voices of The Earth that matter most to me. And my response to loneliness is To Move. To Walk. To Extend a Kindness to Someone. To Make Something Using My Hands. Maybe then, after all, to write (By Hand). For, to be a female who writes, I have learned, I may not prioritise the role of ‘being a writer’. For a writer such as I am – and this is, despite everything I did not want and did not ask for, a destiny of choice – the act of writing must come last of all. For a woman, writing is a verb, not a name, not an identity. Then it is easier done than said.

I see your story as the beginning of The Dance Of Wildflowers In The Wind. Your wildflowers. Your seeds and your planting. For, the way I see it, your hands are clean now. From All The Work – writing and otherwise – which you have done and still do, through the summertimes of your father’s embrace, through the winters of your mother and sister and brother, through your wound’s blooms every spring (Finding Years in Summer Days) through to “the silken smell of autumn” (Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please) – a smell my nose is now hunting to harvest!

Love from

Silke

– Silke Heiss, Sunrise-on-Sea, 6^th April 2026

https://www.zamashort.com/2026/03/zamashort-12-did-you-get-married-to-her.html

Abigail George

Mistress of verbal threads and natural laughter

Margaret Clough died this week, at the age of 90. This is my tribute to her.

"What a joy to read your review of my book," she wrote to me in March 2017, continuing with these words: "Reading is one of my greatest pleasures. The best thing about writing is to be able to give that pleasure to other readers. Nothing can make me happier than to hear from someone who likes reading my poems. It is especially great to have praise from you, a poet too and one whose opinion I value highly. Thank you so much!"

Both her joy in writing and giving pleasure to others by means of her poems, as well as her innate gratitude to life, her simple grace and good manners, radiate out of those few sentences. Accompanied by no fanfare other than that of natural laughter, she was a woman of complete integrity. 

I had written an unsolicited review on her self-published book, Portrait in Thread, which she had given to me as a gift in October the previous year.

After having had two titles brought out by Modjaji, At Least the Duck Survived (2011) and The Last To Leave (2014), she self-published, to my knowledge, four more collections, namely, Portrait in Thread (2016), A Pious Pachyderm, Living Locked Down and This is Music (2023). She also wrote plays and short stories, some of which I helped her edit at one time. 

I first met Margaret through Paul Mason, whose informal creative writing sessions on the Cape Peninsula she joined in the 1990s. He recalls her as follows: 

"A beautiful being who enjoyed a long innings. I have wonderful memories of many nights sitting with her and the others at The Harbour Cafe, writing and reading and eating and quaffing. Of course, Finuala [Dowling] picked up the baton from me, which brought Margaret to living her truest creative voice."

Margaret freely admitted that the informal sessions with Paul had been her foundation and springboard, but the guidance she received from Finuala was exactly what her wonderful wit then required.

For this occasion, I'd like to gift readers with my review and re-affirm my praise of Margaret as person and poet. We are blessed to have met you!

When nature claims a brand

A while back, one of my fellow-poets invited us to generate poems for a new brand of naartjies, Clemengold. They were awarding prizes. A few of us rose to the occasion with grace and aplomb. I was not among them.

I see they make gin and all sorts with those fruits, which I have yet to taste.

Out of the blue, or the still grey, rather, this morning, the word clementgold suddenly became a need: a colour of sound. Merciful gold, orange gold, fresh gold in a lung bodying forth song. You'll understand this little yodle better if you read the poem below.

I thought that the 't' had been there all along, but then discovered that nature had added it back in - for 'sing' to have an edge, a 'sting', perhaps?

So here, at last, is my tribute not exactly to the commercial brand, but to a brand-new colour given me on Mother's Day by a bird's warm joyousness: clement gold.

Clement gold

The common Cape robin's

exceptional liltings

waken me, pull a smile

from me, easily, through

the lightening curtain folds.

Her* thoughtful trills,

flutings, flourishing frills,

spring clear, fresh from

her clement-gold breast.

- Silke Heiss, 9th May 2021

* Female robins, I read, sing as well as do the males. 

The joy of reviews

I have periodically reviewed volumes of poetry and, at times, novels, too. It is an honour and a responsibility. The more experience one gains, the greater both the honour and the responsibility become.

The reviewer has to be an aunt or uncle to the child that is the book. He or she has to detect and point out things the parent (author) could not perceive. She or he has to nudge or even lead the book towards a friendly and supportive environment (the right readers). A reviewer needs to flag room for improvement, partly in case there may be future offspring, and partly to demonstrate the delicacies of readerly discretion - that beautiful relationship between the thinking self and somebody else's text.

This week I had the joy on one and the same day to receive two reviews that have been produced by two praiseworthy people. Both reviewers show awareness of the job they are tasked with. Both reviews are humble, knowledgeable, sincerely concerned with poetic detail, and balanced in judgment.

Troy Camplin's review is of Norman Morrissey's and my love books (Tryst, 2012;  Learn the Dance, 2013; Hogsback Hiku, 2013; Simply in Love, 2014; To The Far Horizon, 2015; Love Letters To The Earth, 2016; A Shell Held To The Ear, 2017. It excludes The Only Altar, 2018, as I sent him the books prior to that book's being produced.)

Camplin's appreciation is substantial, of the technical details in two of Norman's and my poems, with reference to his own experience as a poet. His receptiveness, furthermore, to the nuances of voice is enlightening beyond the purely technical - it provides readers with the possibilities of reflecting on gender differences as well as relationship dynamics. It is a joy to me to share with you the link to his review, in the hope that you will treat yourself to a full read https://medium.com/@troycamplin/on-the-poetry-of-norman-morrissey-and-silke-heiss-df1f32c85911

Marike Beyers' review of the latest Ecca book, Staying Hungry, too, models the illuminations, which close reading can bring. Her efforts to communicate these illuminations provide both writers as well as readers with her unique thinking feelings - yes: thinking feelings - whereby you are invited to access the varied poems in the collection. Marike's review is not in the public domain just yet, but I will post it on this blog in the next day or two.

    

The sacred cups of words

I am speaking to somebody who has no experience in either reading or writing poems, but who is interested in the craft.
"Tell me," he says, "how it works."
"People make the mistake of taking words for things," I reply. "Everywhere you find people arguing - often they are arguing about nothing more than which words to use for some idea. They toss them to and fro like balls.
"But for a poet, words are cups. You fill them with feeling, the feeling that flows through you."
"I get that," says my friend.
"Yes. But in the first place, the feeling is one between just you and yourself, or you and God, or you and Nature, or you and Silence, or you and your lover ... whatever name you give to the state of being at-one in a particular moment.
"It can happen anywhere - in a pub, beside a stream, at a table with friends - whatever. When you listen attentively, words find you, if you're that way inclined.
"The right words always find you when you listen with your heart."
"But if I do that," he retorts, "I don't get a poem. I just get a list - say, like ..."
He rattles off several nouns.
"That's ok," I say. "You write them down, straight - stream-of-consciousness. Get it down.
"Then, when that's done, you can look at what you've got. That's the point at which you can tentatively start using your conscious mind - how can I string these words together so they make sense?
"In a way, you are taking the words like molecules of feeling. Two separate hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom don't make water. But when they combine, they make something we can drink, and wash and cook with, and swim in.
"So you link your words into something bigger than the separate words - something which you, and later your reader, can assimilate.
"Thought-water, if you like. Or thought-wine."
"I've written," he says, "quite a lot. But I've always thrown it away."
"That is good," I say. "You offer your creation in the first place to yourself, or to God; maybe to a friend you trust. The process of offering gives you feedback and matures you.
"Keep working in this way. You'll find your own voice this way. You'll learn to discriminate between what is truly yours and what is not.
"Don't think of publishing.
"Publishing is not writing and it is not reading. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the cups of words in their mysterious beginning.
"Publishing only comes as a very last stage - when your combinations of words have reached a point of being sufficiently strong to be buffeted by the physical world - a world where things are chaotic, competitive and not at-one.
"This stage requires you as a poet to be strong - stronger than you can be when you are creating a poem, where you have to be soft and open as a baby."
I read him a poem.
"That is so beautiful," he says.
"It's a lifetime behind this," I remind him, "a lifetime of being a baby.
"Creating poems is an organic process and the initial conception in the womb of your heart's music is of necessity vulnerable and sacred."

- Silke Heiss, 9th April 2019

Blunder, a lovely paradox, and 'A Wife's Entreaty'

My apologies to all who may have been inconvenienced by last night's post - 'Caution: Poet at Play' - which I had to delete after discovering that I had no authority to use the accompanying picture.

The picture is the front cover of a book created privately 33-odd years back, and the reason I wished to share it was really to show how longstanding my writerly 'career' has been going on, on the quiet, really ... I would not know how to write if it weren't happening on the quiet.

For me, poetry and love have always gone together - both by definition occupy a quiet, private, special space.

The love books, which Norman and I produced, questioned that definition, you could say, in that the private poems shared in public began to function as reminders to others of their own quiet, loving spaces, as well as the fierce relationship-work, that is necessary, to achieve harmony. You could say that our sharing of our private, intimate experiences worked to spread the possibility of private, intimate experiences between others. A lovely paradox if ever there was.

So today I'll share an old love poem, written to my ex-husband, when I was still trying to salvage our marriage. I addressed him as the poet I/ we believed he was, asking, as so many women do, for open communication. It was not to be. Today I can say I am glad that I/we tried and also glad that I/ we failed. He is far happier not to be a poet.

The poem was published in Love Gyres, my first love poem reading with Norman, in February 2011, in Noordhoek, Cape Town.  

A Wife's Entreaty

I have to find you                                                         

again.                                                                          

Where we are together

is such a quiet place.                                                    

                                                                                   

I mistrust you                                                               

in the world,                                                                

which I mistrust.                                                           

I fear your defeat,

and my loneliness.                                                        

                                                                                   

Good cheer is a chore.                                                 

I miss my joy                                                               

in hiding, a quiet place.                                     

Secluded with you,                                                      

undiscovered,                                                              

both of us.                                                                   

                                                                                   

I am not sure

that facing life                                                               

means being visible.                                                     

If so, I need you

to lift my face for me,                                                   

to put the garlands

in my hair,

so that people can say,

‘She’s there.’

We do nothing

for ourselves.

We scoop the water of our knowledge

from our hearts

and baptise thus

each day.

Let us not be silent

with one another.

Let us protest, entwine,

and say:

‘The quiet place

is full of murmuring. Let us echo

its delicate decrees.’

Look: my lip, my ear.

Clay worked to completion.

Please seek to place

your lip against my ear,

to speak. Your ear

against my mouth,

to hear.

In the din

of this frightening world

it is those intimacies I desire.

You may still steel me

with a verbal smithy’s fire.

You know I have words, signs,

writing in my blood:

captains of so many

red and white boats.

Therefore I do require constant flood

of murmured love.

- From Love Gyres, Simonstown, 2011 

Depth and integrity of feeling: Spontaneous interview with Dinosaur Dust Co-Creator Riccardo Smid-Magnanini

Friday afternoon was fun, yet again working with Riccardo in the valley below Tor Doone, at a tiny waterfall I'd not visited before. In this clip he says a few things about what is important to him in the moving images he creates.

It's so interesting to me, who recalls the cynicism 30 years back towards 'happy stories and movies'; a cynicism that was due to the shallowness, indeed, hypocrisy, that seemed unfortunately often to be present, tainting natural happiness - a situation satirised by ... mmm ...

... I believe it might have been Rainer Werner Fassbinder in a science fiction movie - was it World on a Wire? No amount of searching has yielded information regarding in which movie exactly the weather forecaster smiles statically day after day: "Nur Sonne, immer nur Sonne" (Only sun, only ever sun).

At any rate, the big things are surely depth and integrity of feeling, accurately reflecting the complexity of lived moments of experience. This clip by Riccardo, and others, which I've seen, some of which I've had the pleasure of participating in, reflect a shared, ongoing quest for the shimmers of truth as they flicker, moment by moment.

Laura Marling's track, Devil's Spoke, is exquisitely chosen, too.

Privilege

More than

Across the summer grasses' fattened heads,
the wild herbs' yellow blooms -
two pigeons at the bird-bath,
sipping in turn.

They spot me pretending
not to be watching. I can see
they don't totally mistrust, nor do they trust me.

It's a healthy state of being
for pigeons and humans - that state
of being neither one
nor the other, but between,
between two poles of feeling.

Are we the only species on two legs -
obliged to hold those poles
in balance? It could be.

It could be some humans
are birds more than mammals,
and Darwin and Linnaeus' wondrous achievements
perhaps need updating.

Anyway. So across the big-headed grasses and blooms
I sit, noting the segments of cloud
in the sky, and how they resemble
an insect's belly. Remember Foucault
and his 'Age of Similitude'.
Is my thinking that archaic?

For those of you suckling babes,
or welding gates, or taking bookings
from holidaymakers - the Age of Similitude
refers to the Renaissance, when people found
resemblances, connections between things.

Whereas Darwin-and-them thought
in categories, you know - like lists,
and generally linear systems.

It's all of it useful
to us, more or less.

Anyway, the fat-headed grasses.
The birds so full of summer
they can't stop twittering.
All that
is so much older
than the baby humanity -
Nature's most recent invention,
God's last contribution.

Suddenly a pigeon hurtles
gurglingly out of the Dogwoods
and, like a flustered arrow,
shoots by at the level of my ear,

soon followed by his partner,
equally absurd: a metre off the ground,
wings spread, chest out -

as if she were some joke
on Virgin Mary
finally beyond the blues.

I cannot help but laugh.
I laugh as if I were
in company, with fellows
of my ilk.

And I am that: yellow flowers,
seed-plump stalks; the Robin practising.

Nature talks more than I can say
in one poem
at the end
of a day.

- Silke Heiss, 16th November 2018

Philosophy in loins

Philosophy in loins

My letters, these days, step
at times not in terrain
I've been -

barefoot, plain
they point
almost away from poetry -

take a train of thought
beyond space-time,

capsuled into stillness

- like a liner on the horizon,
suspended on eternity's curve,
steadily joins the dots
plotting her journey
into wisdom's harbour:

where brown and blue eyes meet
by a philosophy in loins
of sky and earth
and all the forms of water -
wild, and sweetly bowered.

- Silke Heiss, October 2018

Some words to my readers ...

Filmmaker Riccardo Magnanini asked me some months back to say a few things about my book to my readers, so I did, spontaneously. Riccardo recorded my words at Fort Mitchell near the peak of Tor Doone above Hogsback. You are welcome to view our probings.