Hilary Menos reviews The Snow Globe by Jenny Pagdin (Nine Arches, 2024)
“My mind blew open so wide, I couldn’t trust the sun to set” reads Jenny Pagdin’s poem ‘Insanity’ in its entirety. It’s short, and shockingly to the point. If the details shared in The Snow Globe are true of Pagdin’s life – and the cover blurb says they are – then postpartum psychosis took Pagdin to the brink, and pushed her over.
In ‘Houses’, probably my favourite poem in this collection, Pagdin uses the image of a partially-demolished house to reinforce the impression of a mind being physically blown apart. The poem begins:
They interviewed a guy on Anglia, the end wall
of his terrace blown clean off like a doll’s house
[…]
That’s how my head feels –
Later in the piece, Pagdin says she feels “like you might light up all the water in the pipes with potassium / screaming at dog-whistle pitch that you want to go home”. It’s clear that psychosis catapulted her into a world upended, unreliable, and frightening.
She is forcefully frank about her illness, summarised on the book cover as “a fearsome, glittering inner storm of severe mental illness during new motherhood”, as well as many other aspects of childbirth. She writes matter-of-factly about being stitched up after tearing during the delivery of her son, (“it’s like a jigsaw” says the midwife), and later about how these sutures come “unraveled”. She details what happened when she was sectioned: “between my coarse screams a rubber black bar over me in the ambulance like the Big Dipper”. And she writes about the strain her mental health issues placed on her marriage: “When my wedding band snapped / it made a fault-line we dared not glimpse or cross”. She mourns not being able to breastfeed her baby, shares the dosage of the anti-psychotic she was prescribed, and later describes a miscarriage as “the seahorse on a towel / in the bathroom”.
In ‘Milk-tooth’ she laments the loss of her son’s first tooth:
Oh tears and blood, oh unbridged gap,
oh implacable loss, never to be returned.
The tooth is kept in a keepsake box with other memorabilia, including “the other tag, from our other stay, / the one you don’t know about”. Does this imply a previous baby lost?
Even more painful to read, though, is the ambivalence towards her own baby son, hinted at in ‘Gore’, where she says: “the hours they made me push you, / inwardly whispering get out”) and towards her sane life, hinted at in ‘Selkie mother’, where a selkie fantasises about retrieving her cast off skin (which “nestles at the back of the airing cupboard”) and disappearing into the ocean.
Postpartum psychosis took Pagdin to the brink, and pushed her over
Many would prefer to keep such intimate details private, and I sometimes found myself feeling uncomfortable reading them. Not, I think, because I’m squeamish, or hard hearted, or old fashioned – I’ve birthed four kids, been sewn up, and one of my close family members has been sectioned; I don’t feel that mental illness is anything to feel embarrassed about or ashamed of. It’s because this is all so agonisingly personal. In ‘On Whom the Rain Comes Down’, Pagdin writes:
I barely even knew a woman could
get ill and hurt her child.
They said our baby had a higher risk,
for six months then odds were penciled on the wardrobe
Some readers may find this, and other aspects of the content, disturbing. And how might the child, as an adult, react to reading it? A note at the end of the book tells us there’s no evidence that a baby’s long term development is affected by postpartum psychosis. It comes as a real relief to know this.
Also a relief are the few occasions of light and hope that appear near the end of the book, mostly connected with nature – early daffodils or “a windowful of stars” in ‘Homecoming’, for example, where “just for a moment, anxiety loosens”. In ‘How to do your needlework, the poet creates a patchwork quilt for her child from “fragments of old baby-grows, feeding cloths”, scraps of fabric from an earlier time. Near the end of the poem, “the hospital fabric looks much prettier now, as if / a clearwing moth should stretch down her legs to bless”. And the final poem, ‘The Book of Thank You’, seems to celebrate a moment of calm and happy sanity. It opens:
I cupped my hands,
the petals fell into them,
lightly.
But any sense that Pagdin is home and safe is rare and fleeting. In ’Intercession’, one of the later poems, Pagdin’s child has been “salvaged by love”. It’s an interesting word, “salvaged”, implying rescue and restoration but also wreckage and a degree of loss. It also carries an echo of ‘savaged’. And the poem ends on a note of dread and with a prayer.
The walls will not hold. Please
Mother pray for us.
What is it that makes some contemporary poets – for Pagdin is not alone in this – share intimate, personal details of devastating trauma so candidly? Is it because they have walked the path and feel that speaking openly about it might help other sufferers? I can see this might be a compelling reason to share.
Between one and two per cent of new mothers suffer from postpartum psychosis. Symptoms can include mania, depression, confusion, hallucinations and delusions. Suicide linked to postpartum psychosis is a rare, but potential, outcome. In the UK there are 1400 cases of postpartum psychosis each year, and between one and five postpartum psychosis-related suicides each year, and approximately one postpartum psychosis-related infanticide in the UK each decade. I didn’t know this.
So yes, it’s surely important to make this information more widely known and better understood. And why not through poetry, which can cut through statistics to tell a human story. Near the end of ‘Houses’, the speaker says, “Some of them – some of us – kill our babies.” This admission stays with me to the end of the book – and beyond.
For more information and support on postpartum psychosis see the NHS website, Action on Postpartum Psychosis or Postpartum Support International.
Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem. Her first collection, Berg (Seren, 2009), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010. Her second collection is Red Devon (Seren, 2013). Her pamphlet, Human Tissue (Smith|Doorstop, 2020), was a winner in The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019/20. Her most recent pamphlet, Fear of Forks, was published by HappenStance Press in 2022.
