Sandy Jeffs – May 7 2017

Schizophrenia Awareness Week – May 10-16 2017

Sandy is a widely published and prize-winning poet whose writing has been concerned with madness, domestic violence and the humorous antics of women who play midweek ladies’ tennis. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from La Trobe University and is a community educator who speaks to schools, universities and community groups about what it’s like to live with a mental illness having lived with schizophrenia and all its moods for over thirty years. Sandy is the author of the bestselling Poems from the Madhouse, Loose Kangaroos (co-author), Blood Relations, Confessions of a Midweek Lady: Tall Tennis Tales and her autobiography, Flying with Paper Wings: Reflections on Living with Madness.

The Mad Poet’s Tea Party
Spinifex Press, 2015; ISBN 9781742199498

but I am madness / and madness is me / it holds you captive / like a hapless bunny / caught in the headlights.
This moving collection of poems shares a journey through madness over four decades, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the motley gathering of characters at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Delightful and insightful, playful and serious, witty and whimsical, The Mad Poet’s Tea Party provides a devastating commentary on how our society treats those with mental illness from the perspective of someone who has experienced all its interventions. It captures in poetic form the enigmas and contradiction in madness.

The Wings of Angels: A Memoir of Madness
Spinifex Press, 2009; ISBN 9781875559909

Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Sandy Jeffs’ poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying “shudders of intense fear”. Yet in the midst of her rigours, she can access a voice both wild and funny. Sandy Jeffs’ leavening sense of humour peoples her darkness with the sirens of the supermarket, a tinsel paradise and high-tech technicolour Armageddon. After all, God is only a word and angels, although mad, sing the wanderer into paradise.