Eley, V. (2021). The blue dragonfly: Healing through poetry. Hidden Brook Press
Section Editors: Serena Wadhwa & Omewha Beaton
Veronica Eley’s The Blue Dragonfly: healing through poetry offers an unusually poignant testament of the poet’s decades-spanning struggle with traumatic after-effects in daily life.
Eley’s poems trace a lifelong struggle with mental illness that first emerges in childhood. By age 7 she was:
“already
showing signs
of emotional
disturbance
bipolar
in today’s terms.”
She portrays her child self as:
“crying
upset
alone”
and prone to tantrums, with
“emotions, whirling
out of control
again
unable to resolve
conflicts
with no centre.”
Poems in this section suggest that her condition may be inherited, and that parental bewilderment (rigidity and indulgence) may exacerbate it. But the second poem in the collection…
