Category: Relating Suicide

I was delighted to be invited by Manchester University Press to write an endorsement for J. T. Welsch’s critical study, The poetry of suicide: Learning to read a difficult death. Like my own writing in Relating Suicide, Welsch has entwined the personal and the critical registers in his book, moving across and between them throughout its chapters.

Welsch opens his study by reflecting on the ways in which the personal anecdote so often begins books about suicide. Typically, as in my own case, the story centres on an individual death, but Welsch’s family history of multiple suicides confounds the idea of suicide as an isolated tragedy and works against a singularity of meaning. For Welsch, accordingly, suicides never exist in isolation – chiming with my own emphasis on suicide’s inherent relationality – and their meaning is never fixed or final. On both of these counts, he suggests, suicide is resonant with poetry. A poem is always in conversation with other poems, and it demands interpretation even as it is resistant to it. Welsch also urges to engage with the poetry of suicide because, in a context in which our language for suicide has been flattened to the scientific and the impersonal, poetry can deepen and widen our vocabulary, and let in the emotional, the personal, the ethical, and the political.

Welsch’s first chapter elaborates on language and suicide. He turns to Hamlet’s soliloquy, which has often been cited as a cipher for the universality of suicide. Welsch reads it against the grain to argue for suicide’s multiplicity and messiness. Locating Hamlet’s speech in its historical context, Welsch pulls out the diversity of views on suicide that jostle within it, reflecting the complex positioning of suicide between religion and reason in Shakespeare’s time. He finds a similar confusion expressed in Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Marlowe, Donne, and Montaigne. Ophelia’s death, too, becomes destabilised as a suicide in Welsch’s reading. He points out that a death only becomes a suicide through the act of naming, which means that suicide is always contingent on other people’s interpretations. Ophelia’s death is reported not seen, and Welsch traces the ways in which it is recounted by a range of characters from Gertrude to the gravediggers, each of whom inflect the act differently, according to their own vantage point. This uncertainty, or even unease, in relation to suicide becomes for Welsch, as it was for me, a generative starting point for thinking and writing.

The following two chapters link suicide and poetry through the acts of authorship and reading. The legal requirement for intention in relation to suicide means that the question of agency is inherent to a death being named as suicide. Welsch draws a parallel between suicidal agency and the problem of authorial intention in poetry, or the contested weight that should be given to the poet’s presumed intent when writing a poem. Reading the poetry of suicide doubles the question of intention, and the ‘Plath problem’ refers to the conundrum of how to read a poem in relation to an author’s suicide without either becoming bogged down in biographical speculation or letting the death dominate the life. Added to this, Welsch notes that the unequal recognition of agency in the contexts of gender, race, and colonialism has consequences for whether a death is considered to be suicide or accident. Erasing agency or authorship reinforces already existing inequalities, and Welsch tracks the erasure of Plath’s suicidal agency, first by Al Alvarez in The Savage God and later by Ted Hughes. Accepting agency, on the other hand, entails also accepting the limit of what we can know of another’s intentions, meaning that we are bound to the act of reading and re-reading.

Welsch likens the reader of suicide to a person entering a forest – rather than following a single track, the person finds that the routes through the trees are various and the path taken will depend on past experience. Welsch’s imagery deliberately echoes Dante’s ‘pathless wood’ in the Inferno, a text that is often read as condemning suicides to the lowest circle of hell. Welsch indicates that, in fact, suicides appear in the different circles of hell and he also calls attention to Dante’s expressions of sympathy when confronted with the suffering of the suicide Pier delle Vigne in the lowest circle of hell. As in Shakespeare, different approaches to suicide rub against one another in The Inferno. Extrapolating out from Dante, Welsh suggests that poetry does not offer a map through the forest or tell us what to think about suicide. Rather, the poem creates a space for thinking through what path through the forest we will choose, or what kind of reader of suicide we will be.

The main body of the book addresses how our readings of suicide are determined by questions of age. In public discourse, if not in statistics of incidence, dominance is given to youth suicide, which is invariably read through the lens of influence – particularly that of social media. When suicide occurs across the different generations of a family, as in Welsch’s own case, the idea of inheritance comes to the fore, with a wealth of studies pointing to biological or genetic factors. If suicide occurs in later life, it is bound to questions of illness and mortality, the right to choose one’s own time and means of death. In each case, Welsch illuminates the ways in which poetry shows lives to be complex, varied, and diverse, and not reducible to a single cause of death. Poetry by poets who died young shifts the emphasis towards a range of cultural and political factors. Plath shows us that an identification with suicide can be passed on through the stories and myths we tell as much as through genes and biology. Poems by poets who died late in life encompass much more than encroaching illness and death. These chapters cumulatively demonstrate Welsch’s point that poetry enriches our vocabulary for speaking about suicide, and works against the singular explanation.

Welsch’s final chapter turns to the question of suicide as political. If suicide is typically seen to be a personal or private act, divorced from structural and political circumstances, Welsch underlines that it always affects and implicates others. His watery imagery of ripples echoes my own vocabulary in Relating Suicide for articulating suicide’s concentric and widening effects. Rather than reading the poetry of suicide in a narrowly political sense, however, Welsch returns to the question of reading, noting that suicide is always connected to broader contexts and readings. For Welsch, a political poetry of suicide can be read in a poet like Paul Celan – not (or not only) because his death was preceded by political persecution, but (also) because his late poetry anticipated his own death and surrendered its meaning to other people’s readings. In this gesture, Welsch observes, Celan recognises that his death will be read and re-read by others, and he positions the poem as a space for the reader to navigate what kind of reader of suicide she will be.

Poetry has been highlighted as a critical mode in relation to poetry, not least by Katrina Jaworski and Daniel Scott. Welsch’s study gives us an in depth analysis of what happens when poetry and suicide are put together and is full of illuminating and astute insights. Centrally, picking up on Jaworski and Scott’s idea of the ‘unfathomable’, Welsch contends that suicide, like poetry, cannot be fully deciphered or parsed even as it invites interpretation. I found particularly powerful Welsch’s closing reflections on living with suicide, which he framed as an endless process of re-reading. Most suicides, he writes, leave a mess behind them of belongings to be sifted through. As we do so, he suggests, the question that we bring to them should not be: What has this person left behind? Rather, we should reframe the question to ask: How will we read these traces?

The Poetry of Suicide will be published by Manchester University Press in April. Further details can be found here.

Further Reading

Katrina Jaworski and Daniel Scott, ‘Understanding the Unfathomable in Suicide: Poetry, Absence and the Corporeal Body’, in Critical Suicidology: Transforming Suicide Research for the 21st Century, ed. by Jennifer White et al. (University of British Columbia Press, 2015), pp. 209-228.

J. T. Welsch, The poetry of suicide: Learning to read a difficult death (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2026).

‘I’m riddled with appreciation of the ordinary.’ (Richard Farrington)

In Relating Suicide, I wrote about Hunt Cliff, which rises above the former fishing village of Saltburn in North Yorkshire, as a location where suicide is a discernible presence in the landscape. I noted that, in addition to the sign at the peak of the cliff, the National Trust had also erected a suicide-prevention sign at the foot of the cliff, in a bid to reduce the number of suicides at the site. I also reflected on the recent closure of the Teesside steelworks nearby, and the ways in which a lack of employment opportunities and economic deprivation can contribute to a geography of despair. In such a prevailing climate, Middlesbrough had emerged as one of the ‘suicide capitals’ of the UK.

In addition to the official signage at Hunt Cliff, my research for the book had also alerted me to a couple of grassroots suicide-prevention initiatives. Former coastguard, Paul Waugh, had placed hand-painted signs along the cliff edge, with messages written on pieces of slate as warnings of the dangers, and as hopeful reminders that a current state of crisis does not last forever. Inspired by Paul’s example, local schoolgirl Emily Armitage collected stones and painted them with messages and colourful designs. Emily had lost classmates to suicide and accidents on the cliff, and she wanted to do something to help. The UV paint that Emily used to decorate the stones meant that they would be easily seen by anyone walking on the cliff edge. Although I did not include these two examples in the book, they are reminders of the communities of care that arise in relation to suicide, and that, as I discussed, are often represented by local, small-scale actions.

Even though I have often visited Saltburn, I have never walked on Hunt Cliff, and I decided last week to walk along the cliffs to a sculpture by Richard Farrington called ‘The Circle’; an artwork which is also known locally as the ‘Charm Bracelet’. The walk forms part of the Cleveland Way, and is the first part of the stretch that runs south from Saltburn to Staithes. Walking past the Ship Inn, and circling the Old Mortuary, where bodies washed ashore at the base of the cliffs were housed before burial from the late 1800s to 1960, I climbed the set of steps cut into the cliff, noting the suicide-prevention sign at their base. At the top of the steps, a large, carved marker stone offered a welcome rest, and the expansive view looking back along the coast took in Saltburn, Marske, Redcar, and Middlesbrough.

Walking along the cliff, hand-written slate discs were clearly visible from the path, placed carefully at intervals, their messages offering expressions of community and hope, as well as providing the phone number for the Samaritans helpline. Even though there was no sign of Emily’s painted stones, it was heartening to see that Paul’s initiative had lasted, and that the grassroots commitment to suicide prevention was continuing.

Farrington’s sculpture is located midway between Saltburn and the fishing village of Skinningrove. The path follows a disused railway line that originally carried ore from an ironstone mine established at Skinningrove in 1848, which eventually closed in 1958. The sculpture is situated close to the cliff edge, and it was constructed at the British Steel plant in Skinningrove from local materials. The inner section of the circle was made from an old mine shaft mast and the outer part from materials used to reinforce the hulls of trawlers. As well as referencing the industrial heritage of the area, Farrington recycled, in the making of the sculpture, the detritus that the former industrial works had left behind.

I found the sculpture an affecting site. The ‘charms’ of the bracelet each represent a story about local culture, folklore or tradition, and they include a belemnite, a mermaid, a cat, a mermaid’s purse, a bird, a ring, and a horse. Farrington has deliberately not provided details of the traditions or stories to which he refers, which means that the associations of these figures remain loose and speculative. The effect is similar to that of encountering an ancient monument, the significance of which can be intuited, but not fully known. In the strong wind, the ‘charms’ struck one another with an irregular rhythm, so that the circle also became a musical instrument, sounding out strange but oddly comforting notes.

In my book, I described The Stray, the beach where my sister died, as a ‘thin place’. By this, I meant that, for me, the beach is a place where the boundary between the living and the dead feels slight and almost indiscernible, like the sea frets that regularly descend on this stretch of coast in any season. Although there was no sign of mist at Hunt Cliff on the day of my walk, the site of the sculpture evoked the same feeling in me as the nearby sands. It felt as if the sculpture, located on the cliff edge and playing its strange music, was an emanation, or a manifestation, of the site as a ‘thin place’. On approaching the sculpture, I noticed a growing cairn of stones, which indicated that I was not alone in experiencing this sensation. Indeed, Farrington has been pleased by the recent evolution of the sculpture into a secular sacred place: a venue for midsummer gatherings, weddings, and memorials.

I reflected in my book on hopeful signs that Teesside might be starting to regenerate. These have continued since, with a range of initiatives designed to reinvigorate places that have fallen into dereliction and decay. That said, there are still pockets of deep poverty, and the effects of austerity continue to cast a long shadow across the region. My walk along the cliffs had nevertheless reinforced for me the importance of local communities of care in relation to suicide, and the tangible difference that small, grassroots initiatives can make. Resonating with my Angel of the North memorial project, Farrington’s sculpture also reminded me of the power and potential of public art. At its most effective, public sculpture can act as a prompt or a conduit for feelings that are hard to articulate, and they can provoke echoing responses from visitors in the form of tributes that are left in their vicinity.

Further Reading

World Suicide Prevention Day: The little sign that could make a big difference in Saltburn – Teesside Live

Ex-coastguard hopes cliff signs will save lives. – Free Online Library

These colourful stones placed on Huntcliff by Emily could help save lives – Teesside Live

Circle (Charm Bracelet), Pillar and Trawl Door (Huntcliff, Richard Farrington, 1990) – North East Statues

At the weekend I visited The Stray near Redcar, the beach where my sister died. Even on a day when the Redcar Kite Festival was taking place at neighbouring Coatham Beach, this section of sand was quiet, with only a few dogwalkers and runners passing by. The tide was a long way out, further than on many previous visits, so I had a chance to see fully the wooden groynes that stretch along the sands here, and which had been uncovered by the sea.

The iron red staining of the wood, combined with the barnacles attached to the groynes, reminded me of Antony Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Sands, near Liverpool. There, too, the perpetual advance and retreat of the tide over the rows of sculpted men means that the figures are increasingly covered by barnacles from the sea and affected by corrosion from the elements.

I have written in Relating Suicide about my close association between The Stray and Another Place and the ways in which Antony Gormley’s installation has helped me to navigate my own grief. This, in turn, provided the basis for the ‘Sounding the Angel’ project, as I wanted to understand more fully how Gormley’s Angel of the North sculpture was helping others to deal with loss through the tributes to loved ones that they were leaving there. As at Crosby, so my experience of visiting The Stray differs according to the tide, and I spent some time wandering among the groynes, examining closely the different ways in which they had weathered, as well as the various life forms that had found shelter there.

I have noted in a previous post David’s observation that the memorial tributes at The Angel of the North have both arisen from and around the sculpture, and become a vibrant and integral part of its meaning, in a way that is reminiscent of the barnacles that now encrust the sculpted men at Crosby. The shifting nature of tidal patterns, living creatures, and the memorial tributes animates the static structures of groynes and sculptures, and thereby renders them into lively and dynamic organisms.