Wings of Angels: A Memoir of Madness

Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Able to manipulate key images, she moves from Niobe in ‘widow’s shroud’ to Kali in a regal gown of grotesque death. The way is memorably peopled by the Pilot, the Hand, the guardian of the Gate – a modern Cerberus with three heads: Ken Barbie and Ronald McDonald. Her poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying ‘shudders of intense fear’. Yet who’d believe that Jeffs, in the midst of rigors, can access a voice both wild and funny? Not only does she plumb the depths of human experience in her journey into madness, she is also prepared to share that journey with her readers. In a realm where nightmares wrestle with dreams, where death by devouring is a way-station, where the underworld becomes a tourist destination. 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.