Love & Poetry: A Look at Michael Dransfield & Paula Keogh
The Guardian delves into the love story between Paula Keogh and Australian poet Michael Dransfield after they met in a psychiatric hospital in the 1970s. Keogh was at work on a dissertation about Dransfield's work, but once her supervisor realized that Keogh and Dransfield were well acquainted the scholar switched gears and began to write a memoir. More:
That memoir, The Green Bell, will be released in March and gives a rare insight into Dransfield’s personal and creative life, and his struggle with addiction, as well as the indignities of psychiatric care in the 1970s.
Keogh met Dransfield in Canberra hospital in 1972. She was 22 and had been admitted for psychosis and grief after breaking down in a university lecture shortly after the death of her best friend. Dransfield was admitted days later, for treatment of his drug addiction. He was working at the time on the poems that would make up his fourth collection, the acclaimed Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal.
Their connection was sudden and intense, built on a mutual love of poetry and music, and a shared sense of the importance of imagination and language in shaping the world.
Dransfield, Keogh says, was able to “build a bridge” into her “very vivid inner world” and they were soon spending most of the day in each other’s hospital rooms and sneaking off its grounds together to talk and daydream beneath the canopy of a riverside willow – the “green bell” from which the book takes its title.
Keogh was hesitant to write about her experience in the hospital but, once she started, she couldn’t stop. “There’s so much that’s unsayable and unspeakable about it but, when it comes time for the story to be told, it takes over.”
One of the remarkable aspects of Keogh’s writing is her ability to capture the voice of her illness, the way it felt to be unwell. The kinds of thinking and the sensations of her illness are a strong presence in the book: she describes her head as “full of noise coming from somewhere else” and the blinking eyes of the people around her as “communicating in code”.