The subject of Portsmouth Poetry Society's meeting this Wednesday is The Poetry of Rosemary Tonks introduced by me. If you can get to St. Mark's Church, North End for 7.30, please consider yourself invited. You'll be away by 9.30 and I can solemnly promise that my introduction is only a matter of me reading the text below and then everybody else has their say.PPS are a friendly, informal group with no agenda or anything more than the open invitation to anybody with an interest in poetry would suggest.
So, here's where we begin,
Rosemary Tonks
(1928-2014)
Rosemary Tonks published two books of poems in the 1960’s
before absenting herself from literary life, cutting off all contact with
family and friends and effectively disappearing. In 2009, Brian Patten made a
radio programme about her that included an appeal intended to discover her
whereabouts but it wasn’t until she died in 2014 that it was revealed she had
been in Bournemouth.
She had also written fiction, essays and reviews but it is
her poems she is remembered for and had been included in such significant
anthologies as Larkin’s Oxford Book of
C20th English Verse and Edward Lucie-Smith’s British Poetry since 1945.
Her poems can be startling, antagonistic, world-weary and
self-dramatising. Critics were divided in their opinions of her and she was
affected by negative reviews of her work while also claiming that critics were
‘a second-rate bunch’. Her work bears
little resemblance to the orthodox poetry of her period, neither the ‘safe’,
sensible Movement poets or the more adventurous approach of Ted Hughes but
there is a similar raw vulnerability to that of Sylvia Plath and she owes some
debt to Baudelaire and, as she said herself, to Rimbaud.
In The Sofas, Fogs and
Cinemas,
I have lived it, and
lived it,
My nervous, luxury
civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves
have battered me to pieces.
…Their idea of
literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their
own poetry!
and in Addiction to an
Old Mattress,
Meanwhile…I live
on…powerful, disobedient,
Inside their draughty,
haberdasher’s climate,
With these people…who
are going to obsess me,
Potatoes, dentists,
people I hardly know, it’s unforgivable
For this is not my
life
But theirs that I am
living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp
it down, day after day.
(the dotted lines in both quotes are in the text and not
indicating anything edited out)
one can imagine how some contemporary readers were
disconcerted by such a devil-may-care manner and striking juxtapositions (like,
‘nervous/luxury’ and potatoes/dentists) but they make for more than just an
exuberant novelty act. The vibrant attitude, with its demonstrative outbursts,
complaints, exclamation marks and ironic celebrations are seemingly at odds
with their jaded themes.
So it is tempting to make a connection between this aloof,
despairing attitude to the world and how it led to her renunciation of her own
work, the rejection of the life she had and becoming almost a recluse. There,
she explored mystical ideas, Taoism, destroyed material artefacts of some value
and subsequently attended churches in Bournemouth and London, handing out Bibles and living under
her married name of Rosemary Lightband.
In the meantime, her poetry was being rediscovered and the
title of John Stammers’ book, Stolen Love
Behaviour, is taken from one of her poems.
With her books so difficult, or expensive, to come by, Neil
Astley’s edition, Bedouin of the London
Evening, was a welcome Collected Poems that made them available again, with
its authoritative introduction reporting back from beyond and useful appendices
that include an interview, original essay and short stories.
Neil’s introduction tells us that she was buried in
her mother’s grave in the churchyard of St. Thomas a Becket Church,
Warblington, without any ceremony or funeral in line with her wishes, with a
headstone identifying her as Rosemary Lightband, not Tonks. And so it seems a
bit indiscreet to intrude but I have done, unsuccessfully, three times so far,
trying to find her. And so, if anybody else finds themselves by the old church
in Warblington and can find her, I’d be grateful to know if you do.