BOOK REVIEW: Asleep on the Volcano: The Poetic Landscape of Psychotherapy
Written and Illustrated by Marcus Price
EPI Publications August 2020
ISBN 978-1-8381-369-0-1
Available at: etsy.com/uk/shop/Asleeponthevolcano
It hasn’t all been bad. Soon after the first lockdown Marcus Price – author, poet, painter, psychotherapist, educator – opened up his zoom room for an Art group. It was a complete and welcome pleasure to focus for one hour, Friday lunchtime, on something apart from the virus, the patients and fears, to let our minds roam free over the shared screen of paintings and poems: a reminder of good things, of human creativity.
Marcus has always written poems and painted but has been painting seriously for only this last year. His unabashed and infectious delight in displaying his work is attributable, I suspect, to his notion that he is the instrument – conductor – rather than creator. The Art Group has become not only a showroom for Marcus but, encouraged by him, a gallery for other group members. I was sorry that because of work, I couldn’t attend regularly. Instead I bought the book, published in August 2020. The quote on the back cover is worth restating, encapsulating as it does its essence:
Asleep on the Volcano is a melting pot of poetry, painting and psychotherapy.
It depicts the author’s own essential disturbance and recovery from working with persons who have suffered injuries of the mind.
Volcanoes conjure up something wild and uncontrollable and “melting pot” mess and confusion. This beautiful book is anything but. It is a finely produced anthology of carefully laid out poems interspersed with colourful and lovingly presented paintings. The opening pages give us an Introduction, and a few prose pieces – The Poetic Landscape of Psychotherapy; The Forensic Patient – moving accounts of Marcus’ work which has inspired him and reflections about psychotherapy, along with a few signposts to the poems and paintings that follow. But then we are left to our own devices, to wander amongst the immaculately reproduced and vibrant paintings, and poems each given its own page with plenty of space to let you focus or dream, and reflect.
Poetry and painting, like music, are bridges between the internal and external. It is not difficult to see both the earlier poems of Marcus’s growing up and the later ones– the major part of the work – as Bion-like containers. That is, instruments to process and re-present experience. Here can be seen the connection with patients whose crimes, writes Marcus, “can be seen as attempts to resolve inner turmoil….trapped and sometimes boiling below the surface” until, in psychotherapy, they may “encounter…a receptive mind….that can tolerate …the heat of their experiences.”
Poems and images range widely – landscape to homescape, birth to death, school and hospital, Nature and love, reality and dreamlife, pain and joy, and more. I am reluctant to categorise them as abstract but rather describe them as free; you can go back time and again and see something different. They let your mind roam but have enough structure to keep you grounded.
You may think £29 is a lot for a book nowadays but, comparable in price to a textbook, Asleep on the Volcano is tremendous value and not much for a quality art book.
Joan Fogel
January 2021
joan@fogel.co.uk