” Michael Dransfield is one of the most prominent – and colourful – poets in Australian literature.
“I was actually doing a PhD on Michael’s poetry,” she tells Guardian Australia. “And my supervisor discovered that Michael and I had known each other and been very close, and she said, ‘Hang on, I don’t know whether you’re writing the right thesis here, maybe you should write a memoir!’”
That memoir, The Green Bell, will be released in March and gives a rare insight into Dransfield’s personal and creative life, and his struggle with addiction, as well as the indignities of psychiatric care in the 1970s.
Keogh met Dransfield in Canberra hospital in 1972. She was 22 and had been admitted for psychosis and grief after breaking down in a university lecture shortly after the death of her best friend. Dransfield was admitted days later, for treatment of his drug addiction. He was working at the time on the poems that would make up his fourth collection, the acclaimed Memoirs of a Velvet Urinal.
Their connection was sudden and intense, built on a mutual love of poetry and music, and a shared sense of the importance of imagination and language in shaping the world.”
How my heart sings 