I have been experimenting with female writing recently, and I have to say, I think I’m rather good. The following piece was inspired by a revelation I had the other day. For years now I’ve considered my low self-esteem to put me at a severe disadvantage, but actually I think it might have aided me in my sublime quest for female truth. Why on Friday night I had my brocade Cath Kithson wallet stolen / I dropped it on a bus after one too many bottles of Chablis with close friends in Primrose Hill. Of course I never think about these things; my head being like ‘a quick forest / filled with sleeping birds’, so only realised my fatal error when out buying myself a little treat from M&S on Saturday night. I was most alarmed; I had a mere £1.50 on my person and was forced to shop in the discount section of Sainsbury’s. I had to stand next to a man with a ponytail while surveying the rows of rotten burgers and then I had to buy the rotten burgers because it was all I could afford: awful!
So anyway the following is an exposition of that most traumatic experience written in the female economic style (i.e. disrupted syntax):
I skip, I, I, I, skip. I skip. Why does honey in the rain disappear? I loved you once. Oh red compile, I saw you making that pink sludge in your fingers. Oh how could, I forget those fingers you have. Their meat. Yes I know that, now, but at the time I was so lonely without you by my side and the burgers. I ate every one of them and you said I was greedy. Was I, greedy? Maybe. Who can tell? The long clod of myself, the wavering banded brackets of love that I would pour out all the same. The man with the snake like grey of silver ponytail: “Beauty,” he said. “Beautiful burger, I am yours.” Breathe.
Review of Luke Roberts, Living in History (Edinburgh, 2024)
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My review of Luke Roberts’s *Living in History: Poetry in Britain,
1945–1979*, is now up on the *Review of English Studies *website.
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