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In the fall of 1989, on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, Gwen Head’s only daughter, diagnosed years earlier with bipolar disorder, voluntarily committed herself to McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and remained there for more than a year. Endeavoring to understand her daughter’s ordeal, Head used her daughter’s time in McLean as both the occasion and the subject of Fire Shadows, a dramatic exploration of illness, madness, suffering, and survival.
In her verse, Head reinvents her long-dead parents and imagines the marriage into which she was born. She also looks back on her own marriage, on the man who was her daughter’s father, at her daughter’s childhood, and, after her marriage ended in divorce, at their years as a mother-daughter dyad. Although others have their say, the most poignant voice is that of her daughter, Katharine: “It’s getting dark now. Let’s tell stories about suicide. / There’s nothing on the tube, not even Star Trek. / The ones who do it best, of course, are gone. / But we do it well, or else we wouldn’t be here.” (“Pantoum of the Suicides”)
In Fire Shadows, Head strives to understand the terror, the valor, and the mystery of her daughter’s condition and shows that by whatever name one calls it—whether the neutral, contemporary “mental illness,” or the old fashioned, histrionic “madness”—it challenges, stretches, distorts, and uncomfortably expands our collective notions of what it means, not just to be “normal,” but to be human.
Gwen Head is the author of three previous collections of poetry, the founding editor of Dragon Gate, Inc., the mother of artist K. T. Scott, and the wife of biographer Bernard Taper. She lives in Berkeley, California.
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