Bedouin of the London Evening Read Online Free PDF Page B

Geoffrey Godbert, Letter,
The Guardian
, 8 June 2014.
    30. Anthony Rudolf,
ibid
.
    31. John Horder,
ibid
.
    32. Rosemary Lightband, diary note, 20 April 2010.
    33. Peter Armstrong suggested that sensory deprivation during the long period of near blindness and isolation could have been a factor here.
    34. Letter to John Moat, 26 November 1976, University of Exeter.
    35. Letter to John Moat, 30 August 1977, University of Exeter.
    36. Letter to John Moat, 27 July 1978, University of Exeter.
    37. Letter to John Moat, 18 September 1979, University of Exeter.
    38. Rosemary Lightband, notebook 129 (2 June 2012).
    39. This introduction owes much to discussions and email exchanges I’ve had with three psychotherapists, Peter Armstrong, John Halliday and Clare Lindsay. This paragraph and the following one paraphrase comments made by Clare Lindsay.
    40. Rosemary Lightband, notebook 85 (23 March 1999).
    41. Rosemary Lightband, notebook 85 (27 March 1999).
    42. Rosemary Lightband, notebook 128 (30 May 2012).
    43. Rosemary Lightband, notebook 128 (11 April 2012).
    44. Letter to Jill Brandt, 28 November 2012.
    45. Rosemary Lightband, notebook 135 (21 September 2013).
    46. Oliver Kamm, Notebook,
The Times
, 10 June 2014.

 
    This is the first collected volume of a young poet who is also a novelist. Rosemary Tonks is a Londoner, living in Hampstead; she has published two children’s books, and reviews poetry for the BBC European Service. ‘My ethos,’ she writes, ‘is a great European Metropolis; I want to show human passions at work and to give eternal forces their contemporary dimension in this landscape.’ Her sensuous diction explores a world of metropolitan moods and relationships, presenting an individual and exciting vision.
     
    Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society
     
    Jacket note,
Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms
(Putnam, 1963)

To Micky

Love Territory
    To F.U.
    He’s timid with women, and the dusk is excruciating
    The bronze-brown autumn dusk!
    And the half-lit territories of street and bed and heart
    Are savage and full of risk.
    On bronze nights
    When the territory is half-lit by casual glances
    He sweats, each step is hideous!
    Once he knows his strength of course he will be ruthless.
    Bedrooms – he’ll force an entrance,
    On an evening full of leaves and blood and water,
    By the elemental half-light of a passing glance.
    Oh these brown nights are excruciating!
    When the quarter’s full of gold air, very cold to breathe,
    Lovers embrace at dusk with an enlightened coarseness
    That makes the frigid grind their teeth.
    In the deep bronze, when he goes out to acquit himself
    It’s treacherous and elemental
    In the half-dark of a street, a bed, a heart.
    And also modern, young and gentle.

Running Away
    In the green rags of the Bible I tore up
    The straight silk of childhood on my head
                                    I left the house, I fled
    My mother’s brow where I had no ambition
                                  But to stroke the writing
                                                         I raked in.
    She who dressed in wintersilk my head
    That month when there is baize on the high wall
    Where the dew cloud presses its lustration,
    And the thrush is but a brooch of rain
    As the world flies softly in the wool of heaven.
               I was a guest at my own youth; under
    The lamp tossed by a moth for thirteen winters
                             Sentenced to cabbage and kisses
    By She who crammed an Earth against my feet and
                               Pulled over me the bright rain
                                                      Storm of fleece.
    Not for me – citizenship of the backdoor
    Where even the poor wear wings; while on Sunday
    Gamy ventilations raise their dilettante
    In the bonnet of the