Lou-Lou

Selima Hill has twice re-entered the underworld of mental breakdown through her poetry. Her earlier Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness presented the strange diaries of a young girl before, during and after her treatment at a psychiatric hospital. In her recent collection, Bunny, she opened another door on madness, revisiting the haunted house of an adolescence cut short by breakdown. Now, in Lou-Lou, she goes back in time to meet her earlier self, sharing her pain, bewilderment and...
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Selima Hill has twice re-entered the underworld of mental breakdown through her poetry. Her earlier Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness presented the strange diaries of a young girl before, during and after her treatment at a psychiatric hospital. In her recent collection, Bunny, she opened another door on madness, revisiting the haunted house of an adolescence cut short by breakdown. Now, in Lou-Lou, she goes back in time to meet her earlier self, sharing her pain, bewilderment and outrage as she retraces her steps through the institutional labyrinth. But the Lou-Lou poems are much more direct: shorn of her crazy metaphors yet still recognisably speaking with Selima Hill's voice. Returning to the world - outlandish London in the Swinging Sixties - Lou-Lou ends with her discharge, when 'we give not a word of thanks,/ not a single smile,/ as they lead us away to be normal,/ hair-dos swaying'. Lou-Lou takes a different tangent to Selima Hill's other treatments of mental breakdown: another way in, another way out. It is also a celebration of first love, a belated token of awe and gratitude for the gloriously caring sweet-smelling Sister in her skin-tight dress.