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The title of this compact and engrossing book comes from Yeats's chilling, modernist poem ‘The Second Coming’ written in 1919 after the loss of his unrequited love and muse, Maud Gonne. Interestingly, the same year, Yeats's wife was convalescing after the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, so perhaps there is something fitting about this book, written a hundred years later. This time, a different author, a woman, identifies and sympathetically explores the psychoanalytic in the everyday, as the world slouched towards another harbinger of loss and its accompanying tensions, the 2020 COVID pandemic.
Looking at the cover photograph taken by the author, we view an ambiguous figure, Anthony Gormley's sculpture entitled ‘Another Place’ situated in elemental grey-green half-light, perhaps giving us a glimpse of what is to come in the book. In the picture one can just make out a second figure, further away, it could be a man or a woman carrying a backpack, looking down next to a bicycle whilst the statue stares out to sea across the sand flats. Why Cullington decided to include the individual in the background we don't know, but I like to think it lends a different perspective, a relinquishing of the photographer's desire for the Instagram age ‘clear shot’ and also providing us with a clue to what lies within the pages of the book. I took it to mean the value of seeing something from a different angle, of something imperfect, real even—maybe even a different take on the concept of what is a ‘rough beast’. The ‘rough beast’ of the poem invokes a theme of societal fragmentation; ‘things fall apart’ there is dread, whereas here it is Cullington's starting point for understanding the individual. In Yeats's early drafts he used the words ‘second birth’ and there is something about this book which similarly conveys an opportunity for the reader to see how psychoanalytic ideas can offer something akin to rebirth, something to remedy despair, to find a way to move freely within oneself.