Rosemary Tonks (1928–2014)

I should have a shelf marked "quirky." [a:Rosemary Tonks|1074765|Rosemary Tonks|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1642590700p2/1074765.jpg] is a truly interesting individual and her poems please but confuse me. She flips back and forth with her metaphors.
From "The Ice-Cream Boom Towns": "Hurry: we must go south to escape/The bubonic yellow-drink of our old manuscripts/You, with your career, toad-winner, I with my intolerance./The English seacoast is more oafish than a ham."
Or the opening of "Dressing-Gown Olympian": "I insist on vegetating here/In motheaten grandeur. Haven't I plotted/Like a madman to get here? Well then."
Finally, from the last poem in this book, "A Few Sentences Away": "What a night! My past is very close./ Dark rag-and-satin April in the city/Moves its water lily breezes, one by one. My fading letters!/
My café-au-lait sentences that groaned for love and money."

She also wrote six novels (including [b:The Bloater|2408042|The Bloater|Rosemary Tonks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1589650080l/2408042._SY75_.jpg|2415213], and a compilation of writings [b:Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems|23303427|Bedouin of the London Evening Collected Poems|Rosemary Tonks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1412375883l/23303427._SY75_.jpg|42858735] then quit publishing in the seventies (this book came out in 1967). According to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70188/the-disappearance-of-rosemary-to...
"She lived for decades after her 'second birth,' and although she was often depressed and avoided talking to other people as much as possible, Neil Astley (her publisher) makes clear she was functional. In the first few years of her new life, she bicycled around the country looking for a church to attend. She spent time in libraries, parks, and cafés, and in her later years became a regular at the Piccadilly Hotel; a friend she made there described her to Astley as kind and quick to laugh. She kept coherent notebooks well into her 80s."
… (altro)

I bought this after enjoying the two pieces by Tonks in Bloodaxe's "Staying Alive" anthology. I'm ashamed to admit that the biographical backstory may have enhanced the appeal, but I can honestly say I really did rate the poems in the Bloodaxe anthology. Unfortunately, having now read all her published poems, I can say that those are the two best. Far too often her work dissolves into a watery Bohemian mist, and instead of the stark imagery and pitiless self-awareness of her best writing there is only a vague, sometimes irritatingly naive, portrait of a young woman feeling lost in a big city. Some individual lines are still arresting, but they never add up to much.

The prose - a short story, book reviews, essays - didn't really appeal to me. The short story was interesting, actually, but very much an apprentice effort and too close to prose-poetry for my liking. The rest I just skimmed.… (altro)