In 1837 John Clare was admitted to High Beach Asylum, Epping Forest, where he remained until July 1841 when he escaped and walked 80 miles back home to Northborough, surviving by ‘eating grass by the roadside’. This experience was described in his prose piece Journey out of Essex. It is as vivid an account of absconding from an asylum as any. In A Knowable World, a new volume of poetry by Sarah Wardle, the author also describes in four vivid lines how she ‘fled the clinic,/escaping through a narrow bathroom window/shoeless…’ (p. ). Sarah Wardle's poetry is an act of courage, for she examines her own incarceration, madness, abnormal experiences and treatment with brutal yet endearing honesty. In ‘Unnatural justice’ she writes about her contact with the police:

This poem recalls Robert Lowell's poem ‘Visitors’ in which he too describes his contact with the police, remarking ‘They are fat beyond the call of duty’, an indirect comment on the excesses that he experienced. Aside from Clare and Lowell, naturally, Wardle's poetry calls to mind other poets who like her have suffered psychiatric illnesses, including Elizabeth Jennings and Ivor Gurney.

There are a number of love poems here, addressed to her psychiatrist. In ‘Trust Core Values’ she writes

And in another poem ‘Psychiatrists Ask Questions’ she wrote

These poems remind us of the human dimension of mental illness, if we should need reminding. Wardle's gift is to have retained her observant eye and poetic sensibility when her reason and humours were assailed by illness. Her poems are worthy additions to the body of literature by writers speaking out of the experience of disquiet.