Bøger af Sandy Jeffs

Sandy Jeffs was born in Ballarat in 1953. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1976, a time when recovery was seen as unlikely. She was in and out of institutional care for 15 years, including at the infamous Larundel Psychiatric Hospital. Sandy was among the first to start speaking publicly about living with a mental illness, and much of her writing has been about her struggle to live a full life despite this, including in eight volumes of poetry. She is well-known as a community educator, speaking to doctors and psychiatrists, at community health centres, and educational institutions. She has been honoured in the Victorian Honour Roll of Women, Her Place Women's Museum, and with an OAM in 2020.

no pot holders, felt hats, quilt rugs or sourdough > grand projects done, just these humble haikus that tell > lived through this virus its existential despair > During the pandemic, Melbourne became the most locked down city in the world, restricting five million people largely to the confines of their homes for months on end. Poet and mental health advocate Sandy Jeffs was one of them. This diary, written in haiku form, takes the reader through the daily grind of lockdown, with Sandy's humorous and sharp insights on local and national politics, as well as international events like the US election, all written from her study, aka haiku central. On the coronacoaster with Sandy, she takes us from humour to despair, counting syllables and case numbers, marking birthdays in lockdown, as sewing machines come into demand, the Arts industry goes into freefall, and Melbourne experiences a black summer followed by the pandemic, a super storm and an earthquake. Her poems mark the changing moods.

The poems in this collection are an evocative documentation of the harrowing experiences of a child living in a hostile and unhappy home. The reader is shown the pain, the bitterness and the mixed emotions that accompany the experiences of growing up in a family torn apart by domestic violence and alcoholism.