Bitter Blue: tranquillizers, creativity, breakdown

In this arresting book Jeremy Reed recounts his personal experience of long-term tranquillizer dependency, traumatic breakdown and withdrawal. At the same time he explores the hallucinated topography which has come to represent his own highly individual poetic territory. The author's account of his addiction and withdrawal, and the reversibly psychotic phenomena surrounding the latter, could prove to be of real value to therapists and patients alike. Yet his book deals predominantly with the creative mind, in the context of which he probes with insight and sympathy the drug-dependent lives of the writers Anna Kavan, Jean Cocteau, Henri Michaux, Georg Trakl and Marcel Proust. It can therefore be read as a companion volume to his other books about madness and poetic vision, for example Madness - The Price of Poetry and Delirium, his inspired interpretation of Rimbaud. Jeremy Reed's ordeal was a terrifying one. Yet important lessons may be learnt from it by others: first and foremost the courage needed to break free of chemical reliance, and then the hazards that must be risked.