{"product_id":"9781849915847","title":"Poems Of Youth And Turbulence","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eDescription\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is a volume of poetry written by the author in his youth, starting in his early teens, when he was a patient in the Adolescent Unit of a psychiatric hospital in the early 1970s, and moving on to poems written in his late teens and early twenties.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe early poems express the imagination of a teenager, while many of the later poems deal with lost love and feelings of depression, reflecting the sadness and aspirations of an unhappy young man who had fallen from a previous state of ecstasy into melancholy through having been compulsorily detained in a psychiatric unit for two and a half years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePeter G Mackie was born in Perth, Scotland in 1957 and, as a teenager, was mistakenly kept in the Adolescent Unit of a psychiatric hospital for two and a half years, an experience which affected his whole life and which led him to suffer from depression.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDue to problems with his family, he ran away from home at the age of 16 and suffered abuse on the streets of London.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the age of 17, after a brief period in a hippy commune, he wrote his novel The Madhouse of Love in a bed-sit in Tooting, South London, based on his earlier experiences in the psychiatric unit.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom 1977 to 1984, he spent a period working and travelling in Europe, which helped him to see a different perspective on life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHowever, due to unemployment in the 1980s, he was forced to return to Scotland, where he took an HND in Computer Data Processing, but failed to find work in that field.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDue to his education having been disrupted early in life, he has had to survive doing unskilled jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFrom 2001 to 2007, he went through a very difficult time, moving from place to place, trying to find work and accommodation, with little success, causing him to have a nervous breakdown and to lapse again into depression.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe ended up homeless in Edinburgh, where he sold The Big Issue for over a year.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe is now doing an IT course at Redhall Walled Garden, a project in Edinburgh run by the Scottish Association for Mental Health (SAMH) and is still struggling hard to cope with depression.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDuring the 1980s and '90s, he had poems published in numerous small press magazines.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe has also recorded a CD of music on piano and synthesiser All Over the Shop, which is available from some alternative shops in Edinburgh and over the Internet.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDue to his experiences both earlier and later in life, he has a particular concern for the rights of young people, for those claiming disability benefits and for the homeless.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Chipmunkapublishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47038358880496,"sku":"9781849915847","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781849915847_p0.jpg?v=1763757540","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781849915847","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}