Safety in Chaos
Poetic form as a means of processing trauma
In this guest post, poet Suzanna Fitzpatrick – a two-time contributor to Consilience – explores the overlap between the psychology and poetics of grief.
When I was ten, I overheard my dad telling someone my mum had multiple sclerosis (MS), a condition which causes the body's immune system to attack the nerves. I remember the gut-punch of shock, the bewilderment: I knew she hadn’t been well, I knew she was having lots of tests – no MRI scans in the 1980s – but I didn’t know what was going on. Now there was a disease with a scary name, and it had come for her, for all of us.
I hid until my mum found me and asked what was wrong. When I told her, she said she had wanted to tell us; years later it emerged that, when she asked the diagnosing doctor how to explain things to me and my younger brother, he told her not to. Rather than support her with a difficult truth, he said she was selfish for wanting to burden us and told her to hide it.
Small wonder I became a writer. As a parent, I try to explain things clearly to my children in an age-appropriate way. As a poet, I believe that poetry is the closest thing we have to telepathy. I want to use it to communicate as effectively as possible, and form is central to that. The poet Glyn Maxwell imagines it as a creature: faum, the animus of a poem, as he explains in his substack Silly Games to Save the World. Maxwell also writes about ‘the walled garden of the poem’. I’ve always loved such gardens in stately homes: high walls and big wrought-iron gates keeping all the beautiful things safe. Intellectually, I relish the challenge of form; emotionally, I crave its security.
My new collection, Crippled (Red Squirrel Press), both uses and rejects form in exploring my mum’s long illness and death. The first half is a sequence of sonnets; a form well-known as the medium of love poetry, the traditional safety net for passion. I needed the reassurance of its structure: metre, rhyme, fourteen lines, parcelling the trauma of an uncertain childhood into something manageable.
Writing in form allowed me to dissociate, to communicate pain without feeling it. Look at this intricate thing I’ve made: it was a messy part of me, but I excised it, polished it, and now I can stand back and admire it with you. Speaking as Isis in a sonnet written for a residency at the Great North Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne, I wrote: ‘There’s no ill / I cannot cure with words’; Penelope Wilson has noted that, for the Ancient Egyptians, spells were as much a part of medicine as remedies. Isis is the ultimate wordsmith-healer, bringing her murdered husband Osiris back to life, immensely powerful in her knowledge of all names, as Martin Bommas observes. My ten-year-old self thought she could heal her mother if she found the right words. That thought gave me comfort, even in its falsity.
I knew, though I couldn’t bear to acknowledge it, that sooner or later I would meet feelings which would outstrip any of the structures I had previously relied on.
When my mum died in 2016, I learnt that there is no form to grief. I was already painfully aware it’s not possible to ‘pre-grieve’. No matter how expected the loss, the emotional hit can’t be prepared for, and the worst thing anyone said to me after her death was ‘oh, I suppose it was a long time coming’; heedless that they were effectively dismissing my raw, fresh grief as something I ought to be over already.
At the time, my son was aged four and my daughter just nine months. Life was already chaotic, so I decided to allow myself to be as physically and emotionally present to my feelings as I was to my children: grief became my third child. I had scant time or space for writing, but the poems in the sequence which became ‘Endgame’, the second half of Crippled, arrived spontaneously in fragments even smaller than sonnets: tiny cries of free verse unafraid to embody their own form.
Outlining the five stages of grief in On Death and Dying (1969), the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross made it clear that she saw them as non-linear. But in a society uncomfortable with disability, illness and death, driven by patriarchal capitalism’s need for us to ‘move on’, keep working, keep consuming, these stages are in danger of being seen as a checklist. David Ferguson outlines a more visceral analogy for grief, describing his uncle’s recovery from war wounds: ‘For years after, pieces of shrapnel would occasionally begin to work their way up and out through his flesh. Grief is like that – it’s inside you and it has to come out.’
The poems in ‘Endgame’ begin as reportage: a way of processing the unfamiliar liminality of a hospital where even language is alien, peppered with acronyms and scientific terminology which shut out the patient. I did what any self-respecting writer would: memorised the new words and deployed them to access this closed world and advocate for my mother; to the extent that I was regularly mistaken for a medic, though I always made it clear that I wasn’t.
After her death, the poems change: rollercoaster cars leaving the tracks of the factual and hurtling into the hinterland of grief, becoming a meditative exploration of a mind reduced to ‘an overloaded processor / glitching, bug-ridden’. Form becomes formless: the white space suffuses the text.
In On Poetry, Maxwell suggests that poets consider ‘Whatever the whiteness is to you’ (54). For me, it has always represented emotion, and in these poems it’s loss: both the literal absence of my mum and my own inability to express this absence with words; white space as aphasia.
Death is the point at which all human systems fail: medicine, language, the body itself. But if we dare to face the white space around the chaos of this failure we can find, as the final poem of Crippled says, ‘a path through the woods’. It’s one we all have to walk, and our best hope is to navigate it as honestly as we can.
In the words of Melissa Febos in Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative: ‘to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation’ (27). In writing Crippled, I wanted to give both myself and my readers permission to be open to all our monstrous and beautiful feelings, in whatever beautiful and monstrous form they take.
Crippled is out now from Red Squirrel Press and can be ordered via their website
Read Suzanna’s specular poem Geomagnetic Reversal in Consilience Issue 11 (Regeneration)
Read Suzanna’s ode to Melolontha melolontha in Consilience Issue 19 (Insects)
Works Cited
Bommas, Martin. “‘I am Isis’: The Role of Speech on the Cult of Isis.” Encounters in Antiquity, edited by Jeffrey Spier and Sara E. Cole, https://www.getty.edu/publications/egypt-classical-world/03/. Accessed 26 June 2025.
Febos, Melissa. Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Catapult, 2022.
Ferguson, David. “We don't ‘lose’ our mothers – the reality is more violent than that.” The Guardian, 3 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/03/we-dont-lose-our-mothers-reality-more-violent-that-that. Accessed 23 June 2025.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Death and Dying. Simon and Schuster, 1969.
Maxwell, Glyn. On Poetry. Oberon Books Ltd., 2012.
---. “Make no notes for poems!!!” Silly Games to Save the World, 24 May 2025, https://glynmaxwellgmailcom.substack.com/p/make-no-notes-for-poems. Accessed 24 June 2025.
---. “Write in form because you ARE form.” Silly Games to Save the World, 19 April 2025, https://glynmaxwellgmail.com.substack.com/p/write-in-form-because-you-are-form. Accessed 8 July 2025.
NHS. “Aphasia.” NHS, 1 April 2025, https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/aphasia/. Accessed 24 June 2025.
Wilson, Penelope. “Chapter 4 ‘I know you, I know your names’ Coffin Texts, Spell 407”, Hieroglyphs: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford, 2004; online ed., Oxford Academic, 24 Sept. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192805027.003.0004. Accessed 24 June 2025.
 | A guest post by
|