Imagination

This book is a biography of Mars and his imagination (im) from the moment he set his suitcase down in Bristol in 1978 to his last admission in 1999 to the now closed Old Manor mental hospital, in Salisbury, Wilts. From his love with a film animator and his experience of the party life with ‘Clifton Trendies’ to his suggestions to a famous politician in im in Wiltshire, after a poetry poster campaign in London, that the world should be devolved and all power thus shared (just before the devolution of Russia); and from then walking the streets of London to climbing down a cottage chimney after being spiked with LSD. For this last feat he was sectioned for six months in the hospital. The book records his relationship with an interesting permanent patient there, mere months before the village style hospital was demolished forever, and a new, smaller, more permanent institution built. All in all, an account of a life spent in the imagination, interspersed with the survival narrative of life on the hospital ward. The author, Paul Pegasus ( real name Paul Arathoon) won a $10,000 prize and the title internet poet of the year(2004) (poetry.com)