Review of 'The Ghost Hospital' by Pauline Rowe
I’ve read Pauline Rowe’s The Ghost Hospital and heard her read from this powerful pamphlet at the Open Eye Gallery and the Athenaeum (as part of Liverpool’s Light Night, 2019), but it was when returning to it yesterday that the full force of the sense of isolation and abandonment, often caused by people who were carers / experts, expressed in the poems hit me and brought home how much of our own context we bring to reading.
It’s comforting to think that heath-care has moved on since the 1800s, and yet, reading The Ghost Hospital in April 2020, I sense links to the present context of the Covid 19 pandemic. There are increasing numbers of vulnerable people isolated, particularly apparent when we hear news of people being treated but having to die alone.
Pauline’s powerful exposition of life experienced by those in asylums is given historical and contemporary context in a poem which expresses a harrowing experience across the world. A Madhouse Air quotes Charles Dickens in 1842, ‘the terrible crowd... terribly painful, / everything had a madhouse air... this sad refuge of degraded humans’.
The fragmented layout of the title poem opening the collection, with the use of short sentences, creates a sense of anxiety and unrest. It’s a poem in which everything comes in fits and starts and moves to the longer penultimate sentence to create a sense of dissolution, of lives dissolving. In this opening poem the reader is welcomed into the detached world of those in The Ghost Hospital, those who will accompany us throughout the ‘tour’.
Themes of being silenced / locked away are prevalent, we encounter patients unable to communicate with self or others – ‘defies the broken skin to leave me bound/ up.’ (Tell-Tale), ‘I see a crowd of women trapped/who can’t return a look’, (The Ghost Hospital), ‘Walking in circles searching for their names’, (A Madhouse Air)
The poems are punctuated throughout with religious references, (St. Blaise, benediction, stations of the cross, Lenten ashes, and Scripture (‘Have you come to kill us?’) adding an ongoing plea for help; and in poems such as Treatment, Pauline takes us inside the isolated world of a patient who tries to be what she thinks others want her to be – when she responds as a dog, although she is a cat, and the failure of the professionals to reach into this isolation – ‘I see the master has fine whiskers/ yet he cannot see the cat in me.’
Cutting the Stone brings together religion, a sense of surreality in terms of the judgement of mental health and the terror of the patient
‘... a red book and a pouring jug.
A surgeon and a monk attend, assisted by a nun
who wears the book upon her head.
They bind each subject to a chair,
monk and nun pretend to pray
a mime of incantations,
the surgeon drills the skull,
in which a tulip bulb pretends
to be a stone
through which the victim’s heart
is terrified.
Both Pilgrim and Self-portrait are powerful poems that reveal compulsion to assert the self. Despite uncertainty and fear, the poet-narrator goes out of her way, ‘her bones precarious’, to avoid annihilation.
I love especially Self-portrait, which seems such an important poem to write. Powerful self-awareness, an antidote to victimhood,
Never able to choose
I just left both minds
bumping against each //
other like tethered boats.
Yet there is the sense that the identity is not choice, is beyond,
I was cut out
of a picture book
in 1963 //
made to stand
at the top of the class
clean, unlovable.
The Ghost Hospital causes us to face what we may wish to avoid; the echo of voices between its pages is powerful. We would prefer not to countenance some things, but, at present, spring and early summer 2020, we are forced to look.
