A ‘purpose unstaggered’
Notes From The Ward
by Steffi Tad-Y
Guelph: Gordon Hill Press, 2025
$20.00 / 9781774221679
Reviewed by gillian harding-russell
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In Notes From The Ward, Steffi Tad-Y chronicles her experience with psychosis from her first admittance into the psychiatric ward to her formal discharge. In reading this collection of poems by a previous winner of the bpNicol Chapbook Award, I was struck by the moments of gaiety and love for life and other humans who perhaps do not always reach the same height and depth of feeling as the speaker with her bipolar affliction.
Throughout the poems, there is an honesty and candour in the speaker’s documenting her experienced moments. In “Blue and Yellow Road,” she admits that she was “never been good at sequencing” and has tended to focus on the minuscule, whether those moments be elation or its opposite. Interestingly, the poems, however, tend to dramatize euphoric instances rather than their opposite. Minimalist in format and approach, as well as in detailing incidents and their emotional highlights, the poems flow unbroken by section divisions and are loosely connected by an intermittently placed and numbered sequence of poems—#1-#12—titled “Notes from the Ward.”
The collection begins with the poem “Episode” which dramatizes the speaker’s first incident of psychosis in which, with “her illness, unpinnable,” she finds herself “mother // to a god, / god to a mother” and also, worrying in our present age that is fighting the scaffolding of a patriarchal society, with a “body belonging to men,” but at the end of the poem, in closeness with her caring mother who “combs her hair” and her father who opens a Tupperware with an Indonesian “fish stew & cake,” the delighted speaker revels in all this attention and family tenderness: “In an instant, I am // the days I covet / the child in my dreams.” Here we experience with the speaker a return to innocence and childhood, and a feeling of safety in parents’ care.
Poems in which the speaker’s exuberance and joy for life are fully staged include “Spring,” where the speaker finds herself reunited with her brother during that profuse season, when “our walks were in technicolor”: “I laughed and even the flowers / thought I was too loud.” Similarly, in “Live your life beautiful baby,” we witness the speaker’s generosity of heart when a small boy “probably in fifth grade” kicks a ball over a crossbar and the speaker discovers such absolute joy in the boy’s small success that she must restrain an excess of feeling:
I try not to
crinkle my face
like confetti.
How badly
the inner dad
or big sister
in me wants
to yell yes.
On a third occasion, the speaker finds delight when she spots a small boy “with a bucket / of fried chicken / before the six p.m. church bells ring” at Christmas in “Walking Around Poland Street.” In short, her pleasure represents a supreme empathy and love for humanity.
In “Notes from the Ward #8,” we again witness this magnanimity and high-mindedness in the speaker, who appreciates the care of a therapist named J for his patients on the ward as he listens to their stories and fulfils their requests for “milk, sandwiches, or tissue rolls.” The speaker both adores him and finds herself “envious” when he remarks with a shrug, “It’s my job to treat you right”: “I want that for myself too – a purpose unstaggered. Behind him / was a painting of birds, with a bird above it.” The speaker, in identification with the birds below the centre bird in the painting above J, would like to emulate his position as the overseeing bird who cares.
One of the most skillful poems in the collection is perhaps “Notes from the Ward #11,” in which the speaker on seeing a police car out the ward window, finds a metaphysical analogy in herself while the street “matches” her “throat” where it has been her “life-long practice / to abolish [her] inner cop.” There is self-knowledge and recognition of her own weaknesses in this poem that so adroitly uses typographically-expressive spacing that incorporates square parentheses (for private thoughts) and ellipses (for something like doubts and inexplicable anxieties):
She who deserves
my care despite
the unwise
[
…]
& unloving
[
…]
she commits.
Again, in “Notes from the Ward #11,” former Vancouver-based author Tad-Y (From the Shoreline) discloses the speaker’s awareness of her own faults: “I’m sorry // I was out of line / I snapped / I should have stopped”; and so we recognize in this emotionally unstable individual an intense humanity with which we can identify.
In the final poem, “Blue and Yellow Road,” the speaker views the outside world through a hospital ward window at the end of the hallway and considers in rear view her time on the ward, expressing her gratitude to all those who helped her in her recovery. She acknowledges that she is not a perfect individual but one who has learned to cope with her own potential deficiencies. In the following we recognize the speaker’s absolute trust in “L” (whose name, in a traditional literary riddle, of course, is not really “L”)—
She has seen me together in Warrior I and II poses on the floor and we’ve
had enough time for me to spill, despite all my defences
that I would like to teach yoga but I am scared because how can
I expect people to trust me with their bodies when I can’t even
trust my own mind.
The poem ends with the speaker who discovers pleasure and kinship in her new-found receptivity to the high energy and ecstatic rap worlds of Baron Geisler and Kayne West. In modesty and/or awareness of her own limitations, she still does not feel entirely adequate, but turns the focus away from herself when she asks the reader “I / know I’m not looking pretty good myself, but how are you really/ doing brother.”
Altogether, Notes From The Ward is a charming sequence that boldly documents the speaker’s firsthand experience with mental illness. Far from unfamiliar to those who have not been diagnosed with such an illness, the speaker’s thoughts and feelings represent an intensifying of the human spirit in all its joy and personal inadequacy and, most of all, in its need for a sense of purpose to feel whole.
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A Saskatchewan poet, editor, and reviewer, gillian harding-russell’s next collection Lift the Ear of a Nautilus will be released by Turnstone Press in April 2026. Also, a chapbook, A Handle on Things will be published by The Alfred Gustav Press (summer 2026). Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Gwendolyn MacEwen Chapbook Award three times and in 2016, Making Sense won first place. Her poems and reviews have been published widely in literary journals across Canada.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster