Walking to Africa

Walking to Africa is an intensely felt narrative collection portraying a mother's experience of coming to terms with a new and frightening world of mental health care, diagnosis and treatment - for her daughter. Jessica Le Bas describes numerous visits to doctors, treatments that don't work and people who suddenly have answers - or poignant histories of their own to tell. At the heart of the book ('nothing else is working working nothing else is is is is') is a heart-rending set of poems about electroconvulsive therapy. Ultimately, however, Le Bas ushers in understanding: mental illness may have no definitive cure, but there are ways of living with it. Powerful but healing, stark yet illuminating, ""Walking to Africa"" is without doubt the most moving collection of poems to appear in New Zealand in many years.