Book Review

The Blue Dragonfly: Healing Through Poetry
by Veronica Eley
Editor - Roger Langen ISBN: 978-1-738-0959-0-2

Reviewed by William Pattengill

This book of poems began as a private outpouring of words in search of relief that was slowly transformed into something else entirely. With the supportive intervention of close friends, then her psychiatrist and finally an editor, it has taken wing to “illustrate how creative self-expression reshapes trauma and makes it visible: as self-healing for the poet, and as the critical occasion for witness by a sympathetic observer” (Langen, 2021). Thanks to its publication, we are now privileged to share in the wild literary ride that Veronica Eley began when driven “to make…psychic injury speak through poetry” (Langen, 2021) in a journal that was for her eyes only.

As I began reading, I sensed my fear at accompanying such an accidental author on this journey. Instead of the work of an academically groomed poet with a concern for how their words were to be received by readers, I knew I was at the threshold of secret sufferings that were to be coming forth with raw power and sharp edges, “indifferent to affectation or romance” (Langen,2021). This is poetry screaming and mumbling for salvation, not a calmly crafted and formal construct of art: a landscape with no reassuring and recognisable signposts, a symphony discordant and chaotic. I was reassured however with the foreknowledge that some guidance and coherence might be found in the foreword and afterword by the editor, Roger Langen, and an introductory author’s note.

In his foreword Langen repeats a 2019 claim by the surgeon general of California that 50% of children the world over are impacted by Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). On one hand, considering the current incidence of war, famine, climate chaos, financial meltdowns, substance abuse etc. this doesn’t seem surprising, and when you compare our species’ survival rates from infancy to adulthood, we are probably much better off than most sea turtles, owls, and antelopes. Yet our animal natures are crowned with an intellect that can envision a seductive otherworldly perfection, including a “happy childhood” where all are loved, well-nourished and safe from harm. The frequent failure of our parents to deliver the same leads Langen to propose that “in creative literature there may already be trauma fatigue”; but this is not a bad thing, as writing such as Eley’s shines healing light into shadowy realms that need to be acknowledged, not ignored.

Veronica Eley was born in 1950 in Canada and worked as an adult literacy instructor; she is also a wife and mother of two sons. Though the times and places of life events, some quite traumatic, shift

through the poems in a non-linear manner, there is an overall progression from “relentless bipolar disturbance…breakdown, hospitalization, therapy, recovery…and finally of selfhood regained, transcendence and forgiveness” (Langen, 2021). What makes the book so noteworthy for clinicians is how Eley portrays her therapeutic encounters through the same lens of poetry as her childhood, with initial resistance, cynicism and fear that ultimately leads to trust, vulnerability and embrace. It was her psychiatrist who discovered how to enlist her writing in service to her recovery, “to provide a cognitive breakthrough previously denied to the therapeutic discourse” (Langen, 2021). In her own words, the synthesis of her creativity, counselling and medical treatment enabled her to become “a fully integrated person”.

The first of the 120 poems sets the table, literally, as “a child’s tea party” with guests that include a rabbit and a snake: “they had forgotten I was coming…that invisible feeling…a hole in my heart.” Yet even at the outset of her long desperate climb out of a deep hole, she has the strength to “bang down the cup on the table, let them know you are here.” The poems proceed in discreet titled groupings that provide some reassuring structure for the reader during the storm of Eley’s fall and rise. She does not call herself a poet but bestowed with ‘beginner’s mind’ or luck she relentlessly strikes her target over and over. Detached from herself: “I find myself in someone’s kitchen being called a strange name mother…hoping the enemy within will subside.” She inhabits “a world without trust” under “a sky that suffocates “with “fear of a flood drowning in your own blood…words cannot get out they march back in blocking my breath.” She is “a moving target. Cornered, torn wings pinned to the wall.”

I found Eley’s portrayal of her initial contacts with her psychiatrist to be both chilling and amusing. Here follows a complete poem from the section of the book, titled “Asylum”:

I have come to drink at high altar of intelligence
i.e., The Grey Cement of Psychiatry.
There he goes Dr. Grey Tweed Jacket.
Tall, Affected, Razor sharp assessment.
A traffic cop of conversation.I am not a PERSON.
Only a source of information. His office is like a white CELL.
No divergence or distraction.
Only a small pottery vase to express his humanity.

The depiction gets worse before it gets better: she sees him “holding an ice pick, hearing it chip away at my spirit, disarmed.” The DSM comes in for a bit of whacking as well: “diagnostic roulette…a shot in the dark…labeling, re-labeling, tearing holes in my shoddy identity, patching it up, uneven thread.” Her outlook improves within a few pages and the ice pick is forgotten as she addresses her doctor: “you keep me straight, you keep me sound, isn’t that why we keep the psychiatrist around…you guide sort and puzzle, that is what you are good at, but I am still a tent without a pole…does this disease always keep me dependent on the skill of the psychiatrist.” Eventually she sings a “patient’s love song” in the throes of positive transference, imagining she and her doctor as the Owl and the Pussycat, asking the poignant question “what is it like to be normal?”

I must admit that I seem to have a personal preference for art that is born out of struggle and pain, hungry and lonely, over that which has suckled at the breast of cosy contentment. I was prepared to lose interest if Eley began waxing euphoric and oozing self-satisfaction, but even though she does share moments of transcendent joy as her treatment begins returning dividends of peace, she keeps her focus on revisiting her traumas and confronting her mother’s ghost: “fruit of thy womb the struggle goes on after death and I never knew you mother…you never touched me.” In the later poems there is acceptance and forgiveness of what was done and not done.

The 20-page companion commentary by the editor Roger Langen, titled “Trauma Poetics”, completes the book and looks closely at the individual poems which I found immensely helpful in appreciating the massive exertions that the poet/patient made to overcome the legacy of her deep wounding. Once again, we see how the arts hold out hope for those that ‘talk therapy’ has left behind.

IAHIP 2024 - INSIDE OUT 102 - Spring 2024