I hope I don't come to this book in an attitude of undue reverence. That wouldn't be my usual way. Rosemary Tonks was, after all, only a poet but I still did spend some time in a cemetery yesterday trying to find her grave (without success, perhaps the headstone hasn't been put back yet). Some things become more special than others and the publication of this book, and the legend growing up around the poet, is one of them.
Rosemary Tonks 'disappeared' in the 1970's, having become a bit of a star in the literary world in the 60's after only two books of poems, collected here, six novels (which one hopes might follow) and some acerbic criticism and essays.
Nobody could surely ask for more than the lines on Amazon, sadly not on the cover of the book, that once said,
there is possibly no other poet who has caught with such haughty, self-ironising contempt, the loucheness of the period, or the anger it could touch off in brooding bystanders
but I think there is more to it than that.
She surely takes her cue from Rimbaud in repudiating poetry, and literature, and explains in an interview here why she might have,
I don't understand why poets are quite ready to pick up on trivialities, but are terrified of writing of passions.
And one would need to check if she meant such poems as Church Going or An Arundel Tomb by that, but her natural anxiety and discomfort, her reluctance to rely on empirical evidence to explain the pain, comes directly from Baudelaire. It is as if it was there already, and 'a priori', and, whether or not it is acknowledged, there is a kinship with the poems of Sylvia Plath (and Laura Riding and Anne Sexton, perhaps) that might go some way to explaining how or why Rosemary didn't commit suicide but did all she could do to disappear and live not quite as a recluse but, it is fair to say, nobody knew where she was until Neil Astley's excellent introducton, combining some critical assessment with much welcome biographical detail, that sheds some light. She had been in Bournemouth.
Of love, she can say, for example,
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporaray basis
Only as guests - just guests of one another's senses.
which is not a romantic way of describing what it might have been like but, yes.
Al Alvarez described her as 'edgy, bristling', as you might have thought he would but that was a few decades before 'edgy' meant 'adopting a well worn, fashionable attitude that suggests difficulty'.
Rosemary Tonks had been selected by Larkin in his Oxford Book of C20th English Verse as well as an old schoolboy stand-by of mine, Edward Lucie-Smith's anthology in which the note on her reads as if she is still at it, reprinted in 1974, but how was he to know.
One can see why Larkin might enjoy lines from The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas, such as,
He partcularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone's ill
At the last minute; and they specially fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano
because even he wouldn't have written such a thing. He would just use a few choice 'f' words to unsettle the community. Larkin and Rosemary Tonks were not so far apart. It was only a matter of decorum.
Farewell to Kurdistan is surely more a farewell to London with its
abominable, ludicrous papers...which are so touching
I ought to laugh or cry, instead of gritting my teeth.
But Rosemary is more sensual and gorgeously 'louche'- while we allow ourselves to assume that is a good thing- in some of her more often quoted lines, the 'stolen love behaviour' so astutely claimed by John Stammers,
But Rosemary is more sensual and gorgeously 'louche'- while we allow ourselves to assume that is a good thing- in some of her more often quoted lines, the 'stolen love behaviour' so astutely claimed by John Stammers,
those whose private apartment is the street
or
I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste
(and with what foresight did she know the phenomenon of the C21st in which mostly women will actually go to Tesco in their pyjamas).
Yes, Rosemary Tonks, later known as Mrs. Lightband and buried under that name with her mother with no ceremony, did make a bold bid to become my favourite poet. She almost made it but didn't quite. She is self-conscious enough but just a little too much self-dramatizing, her ennui and self-degradation only equal to the way she saw the world. One has to love her for all of that. But it only led to a search for God, dabblings in mysticism and some dubious faiths. It seems she relented in later life just a litte bit and regretted cutting herself off from family and anybody who slightly offended her. But may God, if she ever found him, rest her restless soul and I will be back to Warblington cemetery next year to try to find her and pay my respects.