Two Hemispheres

by Nadine McInnis

Imagining the lives of nineteenth-century women asylum patients, Nadine McInnis charts her descent into, and recovery from, depression. In the afterword to Two Hemispheres, McInnis describes her first encounter with the remarkable photographs that illustrate this moving volume. Patients of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, these women's names and stories are lost to history. McInnis imagines their experiences of mental illness as she explores her own journey through clinical depression, and finds in these haunting photographs solace and community. "In the medical world, the body is often described metaphorically as a machine. Physician-poet William Carlos Williams invoked a similar metaphor when he noted that a poem is a machine made of words. What intrigues me about Nadine McInnis's insightful collection of poems is how the mechanics of poetry serve to explore what can happen when we as human machines break down. Equally captivating in these evocative and sometimes disturbing poems is the historical impetus for their creation - Victorian medical photographs. Two Hemispheres truly acts as a causeway between past and present, health and illness, and the supposed vastly different worlds of arts and biomedicine." - Dr. J.T.H. Connor, John Clinch Professor of Medical Humanities and History of Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, St. John's, Newfoundland

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2007

Reviews

[Barbara Sibbald]

I'm embarrassed to say this has sat on my shelf, mostly unread, since first it was published. Though Nadine is a long-time friend and admired writer of short stories, I was not yet prepared for the depths of poetry. I was however, drawn to the photos of these women in the Surrey asylum circa 1850. They are real, they have lost track of what we call sanity. The poems take this even further. Nadine reimagines their suffering, past and present, intertwining it with her own deep depression and that of her father. I was touched and shocked. I found so much to love, to admire, to learn from in her book. Thank you.