Acquainted with the Night

'Poets and Psychoanalysts alike have only one true medium in which to pursue their discipline - Language. In whichever way they conjure truth from their endeavours, they are forced to acknowledge how beautiful, independent and shape-changing words are.'This book brings together Poets who are Analysts and Analysts who use Poetry in their researches. Perhaps being colleagues does not necessarily make them allies, but in these pages you will gain insight into what passionately convinced lovers of Poetry and Analysis have made of bringing the two arts together.'- Peter Porter'The essays comprising this volume, for the most part, succeed precisely where most efforts to write psychoanalysis and the arts disappoint. The sorts of links made by the contributors to this collection between psychoanalysis and poetry consistently resist the common reductionisms in which either a poem is "decoded" or "translated" into psychoanalytic terms, or a poet is psychoanalysed using the poem as his dream.'Instead, these essays, each in its own dialect, view reading and writing poetry as human endeavours that are distinctly different from those involved in the psychoanalytic enterprise. And yet one after the other, the authors - both poets and psychoanalysts - demonstrate a sense of awe and humility in the face of the way language works - what we (with much practice) may come to be able to do with language and what language can do with us.'- Thomas H. Ogden, M.D.

• Series Editor’s Preface -- Foreword -- Introduction -- The vale of soul-making -- “First time ever”: writing the poem in potential space -- Wordless words: poetry and the symmetry of being -- The poet and the superego: Klein, Blake and the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel -- “Time will come and take my love away”: love and loss in three of Shakespeare’s sonnets -- The preacher, the poet, and the psychoanalyst -- Ghosts in the landscape: Thomas Hardy and the poetry of “shapes that reveries limn” -- The elusive pursuit of insight: three poems by W. B. Yeats and the human task -- “Feeling into Words”: evocations of childhood in the poems of Seamus Heaney