What do you think?
Rate this book
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems
The disappearance of the poet Rosemary Tonks in the 1970s was one of the literary world’s most tantalising mysteries the subject of a BBC feature in 2009 called The Poet Who Vanished. After publishing two extraordinary poetry collections and six satirical novels she turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises which made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest. This involved totally renouncing poetry, and suppressing her own books. Interviewed earlier in 1967, she spoke of her direct literary forebears as Baudelaire and Rimbaud: They were both poets of the modern metropolis as we know it and no one has bothered to learn what there is to be learned from them… The main duty of the poet is to excite to send the senses reeling.’ Her poetry published in Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967) is exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to sixties hedonism set amid the bohemian nighttime world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. She was Bedouin of the London evening’ in one poem: I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown / My private modern life has gone to waste.’ All her published poetry is now available in this edition for the first time in over 40 years, along with a selection of her prose. Poets, of course, as we all know, are either of their time or for all time. Rosemary Tonks was both. She wasn’t just a poet of the sixties she was a true poet of any era but she has sent us strange messages from them, alive, fresh and surprising today… 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… Rosemary Tonks’ imagery has a daring for which it’s hard to find a parallel in British poetry.’ John Hartley Williams, Poetry Review.
- GenresPoetry
153 pages, Paperback
First published October 23, 2014
16 people are currently reading
360 people want to read
About the author
Rosemary Tonks
14 books56 followersRosemary Tonks (17 October 1928 – 15 April 2014) was an English poet and author. After publishing two poetry collections, six novels, and pieces in numerous media outlets, she disappeared from the public eye after her conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s; little was known about her life past that point, until her death.
Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks was born October 17, 1928 in Gillingham, Kent and was educated at Wentworth college in Bournemouth. She published children's stories while a teenager. In 1949, she married Michael Lightband (a mechanical engineer, and later a financier), and the couple moved to Karachi, where she began to write poetry. Attacks of paratyphoid, contracted in Calcutta, and of polio, contracted in Karachi, forced a return to England. She later lived briefly in Paris.
Tonks worked for the BBC, writing stories and reviewing poetry for the BBC European Service. She published poems in collections and The Observer, the New Statesman, Transatlantic Review, London Magazine, Encounter, and Poetry Review, she read on the BBC's Third Programme. She also wrote "poetic novels".
Her work appears in many anthologies, including Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (ed. Keith Tuma), Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, British Poetry since 1945, and The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (ed. Sean O'Brien).[citation needed]
Tonks stopped publishing poetry in the early 1970s, at about the same time as her conversion to a form of Christianity. Little was known publicly about her subsequent life past that point. As Andrew Motion wrote in 2004, she "Disappeared! What happened? Because I admire her poems, I've been trying to find out for years... no trace of her seems to survive – apart from the writing she left behind." The Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, which published three of Tonks' poems in 2001, states that permission to use her poems was obtained from a literary agency, Sheil Land Associates, Ltd. In the 30-minute BBC Radio 4 Lost Voices documentary, "The Poet Who Vanished", broadcast March 29, 2009, Brian Patten observed, from the literary world's pespective, she'd "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat"; Tonks had disappeared from public view and was living a hermetic existence, refusing telephone and personal calls from friends, family and the media.
Tonks' poems offer a stylised view of an urban literary subculture around 1960, full of hedonism and decadence. The poet seems to veer from the ennui of Charles Baudelaire to exuberant disbelief of modern civilisation. There are illicit love affairs in seedy hotels and scenes of café life across Europe and the Middle East; there are sage reflections on men who are shy with women. She often targets the pathetic pretensions of writers and intellectuals. Yet she is often buoyant and chatty, bemused rather than critical, even self-deprecating.
She believed poetry should look good on a printed page as well as sound good when read: "There is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear's reaction". Of her style, she said "I have developed a visionary modern lyric, and, for it, an idiom in which I can write lyrically, colloquially, and dramatically. My subject is city life—with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys."
Rosemary Desmond Boswell Tonks was born October 17, 1928 in Gillingham, Kent and was educated at Wentworth college in Bournemouth. She published children's stories while a teenager. In 1949, she married Michael Lightband (a mechanical engineer, and later a financier), and the couple moved to Karachi, where she began to write poetry. Attacks of paratyphoid, contracted in Calcutta, and of polio, contracted in Karachi, forced a return to England. She later lived briefly in Paris.
Tonks worked for the BBC, writing stories and reviewing poetry for the BBC European Service. She published poems in collections and The Observer, the New Statesman, Transatlantic Review, London Magazine, Encounter, and Poetry Review, she read on the BBC's Third Programme. She also wrote "poetic novels".
Her work appears in many anthologies, including Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (ed. Keith Tuma), Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, British Poetry since 1945, and The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (ed. Sean O'Brien).[citation needed]
Tonks stopped publishing poetry in the early 1970s, at about the same time as her conversion to a form of Christianity. Little was known publicly about her subsequent life past that point. As Andrew Motion wrote in 2004, she "Disappeared! What happened? Because I admire her poems, I've been trying to find out for years... no trace of her seems to survive – apart from the writing she left behind." The Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, which published three of Tonks' poems in 2001, states that permission to use her poems was obtained from a literary agency, Sheil Land Associates, Ltd. In the 30-minute BBC Radio 4 Lost Voices documentary, "The Poet Who Vanished", broadcast March 29, 2009, Brian Patten observed, from the literary world's pespective, she'd "evaporated into air like the Cheshire cat"; Tonks had disappeared from public view and was living a hermetic existence, refusing telephone and personal calls from friends, family and the media.
Tonks' poems offer a stylised view of an urban literary subculture around 1960, full of hedonism and decadence. The poet seems to veer from the ennui of Charles Baudelaire to exuberant disbelief of modern civilisation. There are illicit love affairs in seedy hotels and scenes of café life across Europe and the Middle East; there are sage reflections on men who are shy with women. She often targets the pathetic pretensions of writers and intellectuals. Yet she is often buoyant and chatty, bemused rather than critical, even self-deprecating.
She believed poetry should look good on a printed page as well as sound good when read: "There is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear's reaction". Of her style, she said "I have developed a visionary modern lyric, and, for it, an idiom in which I can write lyrically, colloquially, and dramatically. My subject is city life—with its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, newspaper-filled parks; and its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 19, 2022
I want to show people that the world is tremendous, and that it is more
important than making notes on even the most awful contemporary ills.
One wants to raise people up, not cast them down.
[Rosemary Tonks interviewed by Peter Orr]
important than making notes on even the most awful contemporary ills.
One wants to raise people up, not cast them down.
[Rosemary Tonks interviewed by Peter Orr]
February 15, 2017
Anthologises two beautiful collections of poetry, accompanied by an introduction / essay on Tonks which concentrates on her biography and psychological problems to an extent that, given its comparative length, risks overshadowing the poems themselves. Tonks is not really a confessional poet so the background doesn't especially illuminate the text, and whilst it may be interesting to know anyway, the verse is very [more?] enjoyable standing alone.
Pasting reviews of the poems I originally posted separately under the two original collections:
Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms
There are, broadly two types of poem here.
One is about an easily recognisable situation. Most likely in a bedroom or cafe. Short, unrhymed, they undoubtedly flow and scan and feel like proper poems. (Unlike some rubbish, the subject of the last poetry review I read on here, with words separated for the sake of it.) The shape on the page is like a pop lyric. The other sort's subjects may be more recognisable if I read some interpretations or tried hard to create some - but is most enjoyable in allowing the tide of imagery and words to wash over and through me. Poetry works best for me when my mind translates it straight to pictures and feelings, and the carrier medium of words proves merely incidental. The second type of poem reminds me a great deal of Frank O'Hara's more Beat-inflected verse, albeit shorter, and Tonks' is, as expected, more Baudelaireian (sp?) than O'Hara's notably sunny poetry, but not so troubled as the introduction to Bedouin might have one believe.
The familiarity of Tonks' English bohemian landscapes perhaps enabled these poems to go straight into my veins and heart, and meant I loved them more (5 not 4 stars) than someone to whom they meant less.
The world of these poems is also the world of Pulp and Suede lyrics, of the endless glittering possibilities inherent in being free and in your twenties and leaving for a night out in a big city, (and recovery the next day); Dickensian alleys, deserted at 5am - perhaps the view from your flat's window; French New Wave (a touch more glamorous than the British); that bit set in Soho in Zadie Smith's NW. There is also more than anticipated about nature, sometimes with a similar louche and suggestive darkness; no overt occult, but the suggestion it wouldn't be unwelcome.
I already knew what I was expecting - the question was whether it lived up to that. Very much so, yes. (I expect a slight downhill from the later stuff.) Especially as the poems are short, it never felt like an endeavour to read them; you could quite easily pick the book up and read one or two for a couple of minutes whilst wandering about the room or getting ready to go out.
And thank you to one of my GR friends for putting this book into the feed months before I heard about the new collection.
Iliad of Broken Sentences
Her second collection (pub 1967) and very brief, half the length perhaps of Notes on Bedrooms and Cafes. In Notes, if I merely flick through it, I see references to disgust and anger - yet if reading with concentration, I immerse myself in other images, barely noticing the crossness, or (regardless of what I've heard about the poet in the intro) feeling that it's knowing, queenish exaggeration for the purposes of style.
In Iliad, though, 'huffy' was the strongest feeling I got from the poems. Others are dominated by tiredness. A few still have the dark glee and energetic enjoyment of the moment of the earlier poems (especially 'Song of the October Wind' and 'Students in Bertorelli's' [So was the Italian captain in Allo Allo named after a London restaurant? Seems not unlikely.]) Occasionally it's all made to feel like a cultivated pose, e.g. in the wonderfully named 'Dressing-gown Olympian'
I insist on vegetating here
In motheaten grandeur. Haven’t I plotted
Like a madman to get here? Well then.
That bit reminds me so very much of someone I knew, as does its predecessor 'Orpheus in Soho' of another
His search is desperate!
And the little night-shops of the Underworld
With their kiosks…they know it,
His nocturnal excursions were only for cigarettes - but this poem contains the sense of an eternity on the pull, as student single days seemed.
These sulkier poems conjured somewhat less inviting imagery for me than did Notes. An old occasional hobby of sorts, sitting on near-empty buses until they went to their terminii and back again, just to be nowhere for a while (unfortunately the same amount of time elapsed whilst I was in them as did on the outside, so I was always tired and in the dark on getting home - though it felt it should have worked otherwise). Modern fashionable decay: All Saints clothes, or coolly distressed furniture and beautifully photographed tumbledown buildings. (Can I imagine a near future where these poems end up bracketed as some sort of hipster-lit? Easily. Regardless of their place in earlier subcultures.)
The Oriental imagery is more obvious in this collection; I couldn't banish thoughts of imaginary Goodreaders (not my friends) tutting at it. It's mild and rarely about people: mostly place names and objects, and it sets Tonks within a tradition of the French Symbolists, and Dorian Gray's opium den, and the twilight of the British Empire.
These poems still do their faded glamour thing wonderfully and I'd rather read them over plenty of other stuff - I just prefer the other lot.
----
I love the poems themselves 5-stars. For me, they lived up to the decadent promise of this book's marvellous title, and the romantic suggestion of Rosemary Tonks as a great lost talent.
The four star rating for the retrospective as a whole takes into account those poems and the other material I enjoyed less. If I had a paper copy - I'm sorely tempted but I need to reduce, not increase book numbers - I would paperclip closed the prose sections, having read them once, to make browsing the poetry easier.
The 30-page introduction concentrates on the poet's life story and psychological problems. There is disappointingly little material offering interpretations of the work; it would have been great to see those for the poems which are, or which I experienced as, exhilarating collections of images in the style of some of Frank O'Hara's verse - I liked them as they were, but commentary on possible underlying subjects may have enhanced them.
I admit to a frequent liking for biographical understanding of an author's output, but here knowing the life almost detracted from the work. (At least a few hours, and plenty of different activity, between reading the intro and the poems made it fade a little.) The intro isn't pejorative as such, but the emphasis on Tonks' mental health problems might make one look forward less to reading the poems, and makes one consider them predominantly as products of a troubled mind (there is a great deal more fun in them than that, and after reading the work I felt these psychological issues should have been shown as more incidental, as they tend to be in accounts of many artists and writers.) By way of contrast I recalled this review showing how a well-adjusted person finds great value in work by a poet very different from himself.
I found myself wandering avenues of thought unconducive to poetry. Such as considering the descriptions of Tonks' attitudes and problems, making an armchair diagnosis, for a long while thinking it polite and literary-minded of the writer not to cite one (adjectives and descriptions rather than labels); then he does so in a badly phrased manner suggesting he did little research other than on Tonks and those who knew her.
Likewise unpoetical, I thought of the parallels between the ageing Tonks' fervent rejection of non-Christian artefacts she'd once loved, and those who'd disagree with her religiosity and some other ways of thinking, yet who frequently reject works of art because they are 'unhealthy' (a judgement which only seems a whisker away here) or politically unsound. Even if this approach is not my cuppa, bracketing all these opposed parties together makes me ask how unfair is my intolerance of intolerance? That old liberal knot.
Then there is the ethical question of whether it was right to republish Tonks' work after her death: she suppressed it and refused republication whilst she lived. Crucially from a procedural viewpoint, she did not refer to it in her will - but, it's said, she no longer considered herself the person who wrote the poetry. There's no final right answer here. I don't think it's right to ride roughshod over the wishes of a cantankerous old lady whom I'd likely have disagreed with on many matters. But I loved being able to read this poetry, without sneezing from old second hand copies - and curiously it's exactly the sort of stuff which is of, which takes me to, a world where tortuous analysis and self-criticism is almost banished in favour of sensation, beauty and direct experience.
It was not in the poems, but in the interviews and non-fiction prose that I found what I had, after reading the introduction, hoped not to. Did the preface's negative elements make me readier to see a sort of rigidity and peevishness than I might otherwise have been? For example a review of poetry books does not examine what the other poets were trying to achieve and their concomitant success - but seems to consider there are only one or two correct ways to approach poetry.
I did a thought-experiment, imagining these essays were by someone else; I still wasn't fond of them and thought that, given their length and seriousness, they were too keen on single points of view, and uninterested in how others thought. But they were easy to place in a venerable tradition of judgemental, serious authorial voices proclaiming from on high, including those used by writers commonly regarded as very personable, such as Zadie Smith. This removed pathology from the equation but did not make me like the items. One of the longer essays was about Colette, a writer of whom - on the basis of one book, Cheri - I'm not a fan, despite having expected to be. I've occasionally hoped someone would explain what there is to like in Colette's work if I were to give it another go - but this piece was not the thing for the job. Non-fiction was, as far as I'm concerned, probably not Rosemary Tonks' best medium. Just as some people may be fantastic conversationalists, but write disappointingly mediocre fiction. Tonks was wonderful at poetry and possibly rather good at fiction; there is one short story at the end here, atmospheric and involving, and much like I imagined a grown-up Francoise Sagan (I've only read Bonjour Tristesse) might be.
I'm ever so glad these poems have been reissued, but it was a bit frustrating to have to push away the supplementary material in order to enjoy them to the fullest extent.
May 2015
Feb '16, Clive James on Philip Larkin (from Latest Readings):
The turmoil of his psyche is the least interesting thing about him. His true profundity is right there on the surface, in the beauty of his line. Every ugly moment of his interior battles was in service to that beauty. (The last sentence is not how the older Tonks would have liked to see it, but perhaps the reader can look at it this way figuratively.)
Pasting reviews of the poems I originally posted separately under the two original collections:
Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms
There are, broadly two types of poem here.
One is about an easily recognisable situation. Most likely in a bedroom or cafe. Short, unrhymed, they undoubtedly flow and scan and feel like proper poems. (Unlike some rubbish, the subject of the last poetry review I read on here, with words separated for the sake of it.) The shape on the page is like a pop lyric. The other sort's subjects may be more recognisable if I read some interpretations or tried hard to create some - but is most enjoyable in allowing the tide of imagery and words to wash over and through me. Poetry works best for me when my mind translates it straight to pictures and feelings, and the carrier medium of words proves merely incidental. The second type of poem reminds me a great deal of Frank O'Hara's more Beat-inflected verse, albeit shorter, and Tonks' is, as expected, more Baudelaireian (sp?) than O'Hara's notably sunny poetry, but not so troubled as the introduction to Bedouin might have one believe.
The familiarity of Tonks' English bohemian landscapes perhaps enabled these poems to go straight into my veins and heart, and meant I loved them more (5 not 4 stars) than someone to whom they meant less.
The world of these poems is also the world of Pulp and Suede lyrics, of the endless glittering possibilities inherent in being free and in your twenties and leaving for a night out in a big city, (and recovery the next day); Dickensian alleys, deserted at 5am - perhaps the view from your flat's window; French New Wave (a touch more glamorous than the British); that bit set in Soho in Zadie Smith's NW. There is also more than anticipated about nature, sometimes with a similar louche and suggestive darkness; no overt occult, but the suggestion it wouldn't be unwelcome.
I already knew what I was expecting - the question was whether it lived up to that. Very much so, yes. (I expect a slight downhill from the later stuff.) Especially as the poems are short, it never felt like an endeavour to read them; you could quite easily pick the book up and read one or two for a couple of minutes whilst wandering about the room or getting ready to go out.
And thank you to one of my GR friends for putting this book into the feed months before I heard about the new collection.
Iliad of Broken Sentences
Her second collection (pub 1967) and very brief, half the length perhaps of Notes on Bedrooms and Cafes. In Notes, if I merely flick through it, I see references to disgust and anger - yet if reading with concentration, I immerse myself in other images, barely noticing the crossness, or (regardless of what I've heard about the poet in the intro) feeling that it's knowing, queenish exaggeration for the purposes of style.
In Iliad, though, 'huffy' was the strongest feeling I got from the poems. Others are dominated by tiredness. A few still have the dark glee and energetic enjoyment of the moment of the earlier poems (especially 'Song of the October Wind' and 'Students in Bertorelli's' [So was the Italian captain in Allo Allo named after a London restaurant? Seems not unlikely.]) Occasionally it's all made to feel like a cultivated pose, e.g. in the wonderfully named 'Dressing-gown Olympian'
I insist on vegetating here
In motheaten grandeur. Haven’t I plotted
Like a madman to get here? Well then.
That bit reminds me so very much of someone I knew, as does its predecessor 'Orpheus in Soho' of another
His search is desperate!
And the little night-shops of the Underworld
With their kiosks…they know it,
His nocturnal excursions were only for cigarettes - but this poem contains the sense of an eternity on the pull, as student single days seemed.
These sulkier poems conjured somewhat less inviting imagery for me than did Notes. An old occasional hobby of sorts, sitting on near-empty buses until they went to their terminii and back again, just to be nowhere for a while (unfortunately the same amount of time elapsed whilst I was in them as did on the outside, so I was always tired and in the dark on getting home - though it felt it should have worked otherwise). Modern fashionable decay: All Saints clothes, or coolly distressed furniture and beautifully photographed tumbledown buildings. (Can I imagine a near future where these poems end up bracketed as some sort of hipster-lit? Easily. Regardless of their place in earlier subcultures.)
The Oriental imagery is more obvious in this collection; I couldn't banish thoughts of imaginary Goodreaders (not my friends) tutting at it. It's mild and rarely about people: mostly place names and objects, and it sets Tonks within a tradition of the French Symbolists, and Dorian Gray's opium den, and the twilight of the British Empire.
These poems still do their faded glamour thing wonderfully and I'd rather read them over plenty of other stuff - I just prefer the other lot.
----
I love the poems themselves 5-stars. For me, they lived up to the decadent promise of this book's marvellous title, and the romantic suggestion of Rosemary Tonks as a great lost talent.
The four star rating for the retrospective as a whole takes into account those poems and the other material I enjoyed less. If I had a paper copy - I'm sorely tempted but I need to reduce, not increase book numbers - I would paperclip closed the prose sections, having read them once, to make browsing the poetry easier.
The 30-page introduction concentrates on the poet's life story and psychological problems. There is disappointingly little material offering interpretations of the work; it would have been great to see those for the poems which are, or which I experienced as, exhilarating collections of images in the style of some of Frank O'Hara's verse - I liked them as they were, but commentary on possible underlying subjects may have enhanced them.
I admit to a frequent liking for biographical understanding of an author's output, but here knowing the life almost detracted from the work. (At least a few hours, and plenty of different activity, between reading the intro and the poems made it fade a little.) The intro isn't pejorative as such, but the emphasis on Tonks' mental health problems might make one look forward less to reading the poems, and makes one consider them predominantly as products of a troubled mind (there is a great deal more fun in them than that, and after reading the work I felt these psychological issues should have been shown as more incidental, as they tend to be in accounts of many artists and writers.) By way of contrast I recalled this review showing how a well-adjusted person finds great value in work by a poet very different from himself.
I found myself wandering avenues of thought unconducive to poetry. Such as considering the descriptions of Tonks' attitudes and problems, making an armchair diagnosis, for a long while thinking it polite and literary-minded of the writer not to cite one (adjectives and descriptions rather than labels); then he does so in a badly phrased manner suggesting he did little research other than on Tonks and those who knew her.
Likewise unpoetical, I thought of the parallels between the ageing Tonks' fervent rejection of non-Christian artefacts she'd once loved, and those who'd disagree with her religiosity and some other ways of thinking, yet who frequently reject works of art because they are 'unhealthy' (a judgement which only seems a whisker away here) or politically unsound. Even if this approach is not my cuppa, bracketing all these opposed parties together makes me ask how unfair is my intolerance of intolerance? That old liberal knot.
Then there is the ethical question of whether it was right to republish Tonks' work after her death: she suppressed it and refused republication whilst she lived. Crucially from a procedural viewpoint, she did not refer to it in her will - but, it's said, she no longer considered herself the person who wrote the poetry. There's no final right answer here. I don't think it's right to ride roughshod over the wishes of a cantankerous old lady whom I'd likely have disagreed with on many matters. But I loved being able to read this poetry, without sneezing from old second hand copies - and curiously it's exactly the sort of stuff which is of, which takes me to, a world where tortuous analysis and self-criticism is almost banished in favour of sensation, beauty and direct experience.
It was not in the poems, but in the interviews and non-fiction prose that I found what I had, after reading the introduction, hoped not to. Did the preface's negative elements make me readier to see a sort of rigidity and peevishness than I might otherwise have been? For example a review of poetry books does not examine what the other poets were trying to achieve and their concomitant success - but seems to consider there are only one or two correct ways to approach poetry.
I did a thought-experiment, imagining these essays were by someone else; I still wasn't fond of them and thought that, given their length and seriousness, they were too keen on single points of view, and uninterested in how others thought. But they were easy to place in a venerable tradition of judgemental, serious authorial voices proclaiming from on high, including those used by writers commonly regarded as very personable, such as Zadie Smith. This removed pathology from the equation but did not make me like the items. One of the longer essays was about Colette, a writer of whom - on the basis of one book, Cheri - I'm not a fan, despite having expected to be. I've occasionally hoped someone would explain what there is to like in Colette's work if I were to give it another go - but this piece was not the thing for the job. Non-fiction was, as far as I'm concerned, probably not Rosemary Tonks' best medium. Just as some people may be fantastic conversationalists, but write disappointingly mediocre fiction. Tonks was wonderful at poetry and possibly rather good at fiction; there is one short story at the end here, atmospheric and involving, and much like I imagined a grown-up Francoise Sagan (I've only read Bonjour Tristesse) might be.
I'm ever so glad these poems have been reissued, but it was a bit frustrating to have to push away the supplementary material in order to enjoy them to the fullest extent.
May 2015
Feb '16, Clive James on Philip Larkin (from Latest Readings):
The turmoil of his psyche is the least interesting thing about him. His true profundity is right there on the surface, in the beauty of his line. Every ugly moment of his interior battles was in service to that beauty. (The last sentence is not how the older Tonks would have liked to see it, but perhaps the reader can look at it this way figuratively.)
July 19, 2021
Жизнеописание Роузмэри Тонкс, конечно, очень поучительное. Исчезнувшая поэтесса двинулась от переживаний и нездоровья головой на абрахамической религиозной почве и попыталась уничтожить как собственное прошлое, так и некоторое количество редких и ценных восточных артефактов, которые, к тому же, ей и не принадлежали. С прошлым ей это не удалось, благодаря чему мы продолжаем ее читать, за исключением последнего романа и еще каких-то стихов и статей. А вот вандализм вполне получился. Но толку никакого, понятно, поскольку она все равно померла. Жаль, что она этого не понимала при жизни. Короче, еще одна строка в "черную книгу" христианства: под напряжением оно приводит к необратимому и неискупимому вандализму. Как те ублюдки, что разграбили и сожгли Александрийскую библиотеку.
Ну а стихи - из тех, что заставляют задуматься не о бренности всего сущего, конечно, а о том, до чего обесценены все слова, а особенно те, что составлены встык. Хотя для Англии конца 50х - начала 60х годов это, наверное, было круто. Беда в том, что английская мэйнстримовая поэзия середины века меня совершенно не занимает, не увлекает и не развлекает. Все эти неумелые ковыряния в осколках собственных личностей, оставшихся после токсичного общения с собственными мамашами (а у Тонкс происходит именно это), по-моему, скорее продукт неразвитости речевого аппарата и плохих торговцев психоаналитическим воздухом.
Хотя некоторые сюрреалистические образы-коллажики даже красивы и имеют смысл, а нынешние феминисты наверняка бы подняли ее поэзию на свои транспаранты, потому что звучит это как голос бунтующей, слегка неуравновешенной девушки в застойном патриархальном ��бществе. Никакой разницы с нынешними "поэтками", в общем. Как и они, она в стихах своих предстает как личность, знающая много слов, но совершенно при этом не интересная. Безумие сквозит, конечно, но оно не священно. Ну и благотворного влияния Бодлера и Рембо я что-то не заметил, хотя о нем говорят все, кому не лень. Скорее уж она списывала у Т. С. Элиота и Дилана Томаса, только не очень умело, хотя второй сборник несколько лучше (в нем уже проглядывает Эзра Паунд), а отдельные стихи (например, "Прощание с Курдистаном") так и вообще отдают миром Пинчона.
Ну а стихи - из тех, что заставляют задуматься не о бренности всего сущего, конечно, а о том, до чего обесценены все слова, а особенно те, что составлены встык. Хотя для Англии конца 50х - начала 60х годов это, наверное, было круто. Беда в том, что английская мэйнстримовая поэзия середины века меня совершенно не занимает, не увлекает и не развлекает. Все эти неумелые ковыряния в осколках собственных личностей, оставшихся после токсичного общения с собственными мамашами (а у Тонкс происходит именно это), по-моему, скорее продукт неразвитости речевого аппарата и плохих торговцев психоаналитическим воздухом.
Хотя некоторые сюрреалистические образы-коллажики даже красивы и имеют смысл, а нынешние феминисты наверняка бы подняли ее поэзию на свои транспаранты, потому что звучит это как голос бунтующей, слегка неуравновешенной девушки в застойном патриархальном ��бществе. Никакой разницы с нынешними "поэтками", в общем. Как и они, она в стихах своих предстает как личность, знающая много слов, но совершенно при этом не интересная. Безумие сквозит, конечно, но оно не священно. Ну и благотворного влияния Бодлера и Рембо я что-то не заметил, хотя о нем говорят все, кому не лень. Скорее уж она списывала у Т. С. Элиота и Дилана Томаса, только не очень умело, хотя второй сборник несколько лучше (в нем уже проглядывает Эзра Паунд), а отдельные стихи (например, "Прощание с Курдистаном") так и вообще отдают миром Пинчона.
March 29, 2017
What a wonderful tonic to the obsessions of our current age, this collection of poems from back when a contemporary Romanticism seemed the wave of the future, when poetry was about the evocation of feeling, when folks read Whitman and Rimbaud without irony or qualm. How about this, from "The Solitary's Bedroom:" Now for the night, liquid or bristling/When owls make the ink squeak at my window/And my bedroom that can bone my body of its will/Drinks out my brain on pillows. Or this: Fear is the blindworm in the brain/in souls that keep house with a dagger/and love the cabbage shade. Or this: We set about acquiring one another/Urgently! But on a temporary basis (Story of a Hotel Room). Or: "You mistook the nature of your calling. Poets are only at work/With an agate twilight going through the street/When they live, dream, bleed." I could go on. The book is chock full of lines like these.
To quote Tonks herself: My foremost preoccupation is the search for an idiom which is individualistic, contemporary, and musical. And one that has sufficient authority to bear the full weight of whatever passion I would wish to lay upon it.
I couldn't say it better myself.
To quote Tonks herself: My foremost preoccupation is the search for an idiom which is individualistic, contemporary, and musical. And one that has sufficient authority to bear the full weight of whatever passion I would wish to lay upon it.
I couldn't say it better myself.
January 13, 2018
A 3.5, rounded because while the ambition (explained in supplementary notes) is extraordinary, the execution is not necessarily something to which I'll return readily. This is an odd volume, the collected works of an author who wanted her works destroyed, who abandoned her literary life shortly after it started. Judged in that context, it is a picture of potential, of a deep thinker and (more importantly) a deep feeler, who felt too much and removed herself from the stage.
It is worth noting that the reader should be fully prepared to read the collection itself. In retrospect, I would advise reading the biographical section up front first, then skipping to the end to read the interviews and prose, and only then reading the poetry itself. Her work is dense, and if you can get some sense of the mindset she brought to it, it will be that much more readable.
Some poems stood out, and felt truly earned, but many were too obscure for me. Learning more about her motivation in the end notes cracked the door, but I still felt left adrift. I'd like to return to this someday, but probably not tomorrow.
It is worth noting that the reader should be fully prepared to read the collection itself. In retrospect, I would advise reading the biographical section up front first, then skipping to the end to read the interviews and prose, and only then reading the poetry itself. Her work is dense, and if you can get some sense of the mindset she brought to it, it will be that much more readable.
Some poems stood out, and felt truly earned, but many were too obscure for me. Learning more about her motivation in the end notes cracked the door, but I still felt left adrift. I'd like to return to this someday, but probably not tomorrow.
October 15, 2015
How can I not love a writer who turned their back on writing to devote themselves to almost hermitical religious pursuits? What a nut. The long introduction to the poetry and selected prose of Rosemary Tonks that opens BEDOUIN OF THE LONDON EVENING is a good yarn. It’s sort of a free-verse epic, a modern Odyssey, though, it’s really just the story of a highly spiritual person who follows their moral compass to strange territory. Tonks became a devout Catholic and disavowed her literary life for higher ground. There’s hints of this coming in her poems, which are lyrical, earthy and ethereal at the same time, and exhibit an inner-struggle that resolved itself in faith. If it’s true that faith without works is dead, then we’re lucky that after her death a few years ago Tonks’ estate permitted the reissuing of her out-of-print works from the ’60s and early ’70s. The supplement of some pointed criticism and a short story adds more depth to this complex artist.
January 14, 2021
I loved this book. The volume combines Rosemary Tonks' two published collections of poems, a fascinating biography of the poet and miscellaneous prose writings, including a wonderful short story and a reflection on some time spent in Paris. She mentions in an interview which is published in this book that she wants to write about human passions and the poetry is full of them. The poems are urban in setting - dust is everywhere - and there's humour, beauty and a sense of the loss of something indistinct, unnamed running through many of them. I thought that the second collection, 'Iliad of Broken Sentences' was the stronger of the two but so many of the poems in both were arresting. I particularly enjoyed 'Song of the October Wind'.
November 20, 2021
Just sounded so intriguing when she was featured on Backlisted and until Penguin put The Bloater back into print (next year,notetoself May 2022) this is about all you can get of her work, without forking out hundreds for rare secondhand copies of her work. The poems are a mixture of wow and eh? The prose pieces included are just stunning though. There is also a short biography included, fascinating eccentric life.
January 20, 2022
Bedouin of the London Evening combines the two books of poetry written by Rosemary Tonks,
Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms
and
Iliad of Broken Sentences
, along with a selection of her prose.
My favourite poems from Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms ...
My favourite poems from Iliad of Broken Sentences ...
My favourite poems from Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms ...
Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms
Great city, filled with wind and dust!
Bedouin of the London evening,
On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.
And like a medium who falls into a trance
So deep, she can be scratched to death
By her Familiar - at its leisure!
I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown
While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.
I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste.
- Bedouin of the London Evening
We come into the café at dawn,
There are waterfogs, and civilisation is white
...if you knew the exotic disgust that grips me
After another bestial night
As we come in, broken; dark with inks and dusts and gases
Like those whose private apartment is the street.
After an all-night conversation
When the street-wind hangs on snarling to your coat,
If you knew my (half erotic) convulsion of loathing
For the night. (I'm like a sleeper
When his mouth is stopped up
By some terrible mud-crust the dream had crammed there
And the soul goes pressing up against
Trying to scream with hydrophobia - and can only murmur.
Some love-thought turns his mouth to blood with longing
Only a moment later.) In the workman's café
If you knew the almost voluptuous sense of frustration
When you're broken... And the morning's alcoholic as a lily.
- Bedouin of the London Morning
My favourite poems from Iliad of Broken Sentences ...
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!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.
It's quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he
Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole - and talks
- Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It's……damnably depressing.
(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning
In the little dish…And when he calls out: 'Ha!'
Madness! - you no longer possess your own furniture.)
On my bad days (and I'm being broken
At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw….
I grow coaser: and more modern (I, who am driven mad
By my ideas; who go nowhere;
Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)
All right. I admit everything, everything!
Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)
He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone's ill
At the last minute; and they specially fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her
With her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!
He wants to help her with her arias!
No, I...go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum,
...the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud - that bangs
And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles - taciturn, luxurious.
...The drugged and battered Philistines
Are all around you in the auditorium…
And he...is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,
He wants to make me think his thoughts
And they will be enormous, dull - (just the sort
To keep away from).
...when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smoking
And he wants to face the international situation…
Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!
- All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.
I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.
- The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas
I understand you, frightful epoch,
With your jampots, brothels, paranoias,
And your genius for fear, you can't stop shuddering.
Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.
I know that to get through to you, my epoch,
I must take a diamond and scratch
On your junkie's green glass skin, my message
And my joy - sober, piercing, twilit.
In the hotel where you live, my Kurdish epoch,
Your opera of typewriters and taperecorders
Boils the hotel with a sumptuous oompah!
...(...as my heavy-drinking diamond writes)
Boils it! And loosens the bread-grey crusts
Of stucco from the 19th Century ... with an opera
Of broken, twilit poetry
Built from your dust-drowned underworld of sighs.
Epoch, we are lonely. For we follow hotel berers
Of the past, those who drift in corridors, whose tents
And whose derisive manuscripts are dipped in marble
By your backward glance.
- Epoch of the Hotel Corridor
October 1, 2020
Kind of infuriating. And somehow from another planet - Planet Rimbaud I understand. But also half a dozen poems that brought me up short with the kind of sideways imagery that I aspire to in my stuff. Liberating.
November 26, 2020
Wonderfully poised lines deliver a strength of suggestion neither overly cryptic nor stark. A terric discovery. The biographical introduction is, of course, fascinating but best seen as a secret garden to explore after the scope and quality of a great park.
November 1, 2015
Two mesmerizing Baudelaire-haunted collections of metropolitan swinging-sixties London poetry that exist only by the skin of their teeth...
Read
August 14, 2025A book of poetry is never really finished, but I feel sufficiently familiar with Rosemary Tonks’ two published collections, Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967), to say something about them.
We’re incredibly lucky to have them at all, because after Tonks disappeared from public life, she spent a lot of time destroying her own work, even going as far as insisting her poems were removed from anthologies and taking her books out of the library and destroying them at home (as well as the huge collection of priceless Eastern artefacts she had amassed). This was after Tonks had a major crisis and religious conversion, adopting her married name of Rosemary Lightband and selecting the Bible (Tyndale’s translation, at that) as her sole reading matter. We have her family (plus editor and founder of Bloodaxe Books, Neil Astley) to thank for the appearance of this edition of her sole remaining collected poems.
It gives her lively, wonky, adventurous poems poignancy, knowing that Tonks felt ‘crushed’ by her critics (‘Please forgive me for not writing,’ she wrote to a friend after the publication of Iliad of Broken Sentences. ‘Last year I had melancholia. They just smash and smash my poetry. So these are the last roses I shall write.’ This in spite of the fact that both Cyril Connelly and A. Alvarez were fans.
There’s sharp humour here, as in her novels, but you feel it brimming out at the edges in spite of, rather than because of, the author’s voice. The poems are very different in character from her novels because of their abstruse nature and personal content. They somehow reach a realm of understanding that can’t be described exactly, but that you know is there when you are reading. Like much poetry, it reaches the reader on a subconscious level.
There are some staging posts we can hang onto though – repeated motifs, including the occasional beautifully placed iambic pentameter (‘Or deeply with his thumbprint mark/The softly beating mortar of my heart’ – “20th century invalid”) – throughout her work that steady us and connect the poems as a coherent body of work. They’re poems that use colour from a restricted range of mud, terracotta and brilliant reds and jade greens, much like her collection of Eastern art: the ‘magenta crease’ in a tradesman’s hands; the ‘ink-storm’ of her black moods; the ‘tarnished flesh’ of a riverpike that ‘Drinks the umber hangings of the bottom’. And then there’s London, converted to an Eastern souk, dusted by Saharan winds (“The desert wind élite”).
Just as impactful are the love affairs and disappointments, taking place in a city of the flâneur, reminiscent of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and crafted with a mordant wit: in “The sofa, fogs and cinemas” she rails against the man who:
Gets up from his dead bedroom and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole – and talks
– Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s… damnably depressing.
…
On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment), I speak of my ambitions… and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
She’s ‘More at home in a jazz pit than with you/… Better understood by cattle, grocers, blocks of wood’ (“The drinkers of coffee”). The pain is never far from the surface, however, for example in “Done for!” and her “Badly chosen lover” with his ‘heart, greedy and tepid brothel-meat’.
I find myself celebrating connections: did the similarly obsessive explorer of London's dark corners, Jean Rhys, ever meet Tonks, I wonder? Both experienced romantic and sexual turmoil, only to disappear from sight. How curious that Michael Hofman, translator of Blösch by Beat Sterchi, reviewed Tonks’ work, finding in it ‘… a fragrant reopening of a bottle stoppered up forty years ago... an amplification of the furibund poems that stood out a mile in the sheepish anthologies where they appeared: a kind of wild forthrightness and nausea’ ('The woman who quit' Poetry Foundation, 2 Feb 2015).
This is a lovely edition, published by Bloodaxe, that thoughtfully includes photographs of the poet, and how memorable and touching these are, as we see Tonks morph from the 1960s’, glowing, Julie-Christie lookalike posing in front of a monument to Stendhal in Paris, to the stiff-necked portrait of her emerging from the church with her new husband, Micky Lightband, to whom the book is dedicated. The front cover shows, in a characteristically compassionate portrait by Jane Bown, Tonks seated at a café table, no doubt where ‘… old mats/Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves/That are brilliant with the nap of idleness.’ (“Diary of a rebel”).
In spite of all this sadness and lost potential, I like to think of the Tonks who wrote:
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 unforgiveable
For this is not my life
But theirs that I am living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.
We’re incredibly lucky to have them at all, because after Tonks disappeared from public life, she spent a lot of time destroying her own work, even going as far as insisting her poems were removed from anthologies and taking her books out of the library and destroying them at home (as well as the huge collection of priceless Eastern artefacts she had amassed). This was after Tonks had a major crisis and religious conversion, adopting her married name of Rosemary Lightband and selecting the Bible (Tyndale’s translation, at that) as her sole reading matter. We have her family (plus editor and founder of Bloodaxe Books, Neil Astley) to thank for the appearance of this edition of her sole remaining collected poems.
It gives her lively, wonky, adventurous poems poignancy, knowing that Tonks felt ‘crushed’ by her critics (‘Please forgive me for not writing,’ she wrote to a friend after the publication of Iliad of Broken Sentences. ‘Last year I had melancholia. They just smash and smash my poetry. So these are the last roses I shall write.’ This in spite of the fact that both Cyril Connelly and A. Alvarez were fans.
There’s sharp humour here, as in her novels, but you feel it brimming out at the edges in spite of, rather than because of, the author’s voice. The poems are very different in character from her novels because of their abstruse nature and personal content. They somehow reach a realm of understanding that can’t be described exactly, but that you know is there when you are reading. Like much poetry, it reaches the reader on a subconscious level.
There are some staging posts we can hang onto though – repeated motifs, including the occasional beautifully placed iambic pentameter (‘Or deeply with his thumbprint mark/The softly beating mortar of my heart’ – “20th century invalid”) – throughout her work that steady us and connect the poems as a coherent body of work. They’re poems that use colour from a restricted range of mud, terracotta and brilliant reds and jade greens, much like her collection of Eastern art: the ‘magenta crease’ in a tradesman’s hands; the ‘ink-storm’ of her black moods; the ‘tarnished flesh’ of a riverpike that ‘Drinks the umber hangings of the bottom’. And then there’s London, converted to an Eastern souk, dusted by Saharan winds (“The desert wind élite”).
Just as impactful are the love affairs and disappointments, taking place in a city of the flâneur, reminiscent of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and crafted with a mordant wit: in “The sofa, fogs and cinemas” she rails against the man who:
Gets up from his dead bedroom and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole – and talks
– Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s… damnably depressing.
…
On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment), I speak of my ambitions… and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
She’s ‘More at home in a jazz pit than with you/… Better understood by cattle, grocers, blocks of wood’ (“The drinkers of coffee”). The pain is never far from the surface, however, for example in “Done for!” and her “Badly chosen lover” with his ‘heart, greedy and tepid brothel-meat’.
I find myself celebrating connections: did the similarly obsessive explorer of London's dark corners, Jean Rhys, ever meet Tonks, I wonder? Both experienced romantic and sexual turmoil, only to disappear from sight. How curious that Michael Hofman, translator of Blösch by Beat Sterchi, reviewed Tonks’ work, finding in it ‘… a fragrant reopening of a bottle stoppered up forty years ago... an amplification of the furibund poems that stood out a mile in the sheepish anthologies where they appeared: a kind of wild forthrightness and nausea’ ('The woman who quit' Poetry Foundation, 2 Feb 2015).
This is a lovely edition, published by Bloodaxe, that thoughtfully includes photographs of the poet, and how memorable and touching these are, as we see Tonks morph from the 1960s’, glowing, Julie-Christie lookalike posing in front of a monument to Stendhal in Paris, to the stiff-necked portrait of her emerging from the church with her new husband, Micky Lightband, to whom the book is dedicated. The front cover shows, in a characteristically compassionate portrait by Jane Bown, Tonks seated at a café table, no doubt where ‘… old mats/Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves/That are brilliant with the nap of idleness.’ (“Diary of a rebel”).
In spite of all this sadness and lost potential, I like to think of the Tonks who wrote:
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 unforgiveable
For this is not my life
But theirs that I am living.
And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.
May 4, 2021
This selection of work – which, unlike her novels, it seems Tonks didn’t spend thirty years trying to erase all trace of from the Earth – contains six essays and two poetry volumes, ‘Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms’ and ‘Iliad of Broken Sentences’. Although the latter has the better title, the former has the better poems. In fact, ‘Notes on Cafes and Sentences’ is a five-star work for me. The answers to Peter Orr’s questions in the transcribed interview are equally profound. I was less taken by ‘Iliad’, which is more determinedly Rimbaudian in a way I obviously don’t appreciate, not being at all Team Rimbaud.
(The introduction gives some background into Tonks’ disappearance from the literary scene. I thought she was a noble but pathetic figure when I learned she went around destroying library copies of ‘The Bloater’. I was less impressed when she reduced a priceless Asian art collection to flinders. Bad vibe, Tonks.)
Running Away:
“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 cramed an Earth against my feet and
Pulled me over the bright rain
Storm of fleece.”
20th Century Invalid:
For to bite the dust anonymous
At night is twice as bitter
When the appetite is great.
Bedroom in an Old City:
“In the room with the water mark as rich
as sago on the wall, the young head of a minx
asleep sheds on cheap linen the pale silk hair
of baby Kensington.”
The Flaneur and the Apocalypse:
The Furies are modern, they don’t drive you they entice
With cafes, lovers, dusty streets … with the Apocalypse
‘Not this one – but the next,’ they hiss.”
Story of a Hotel Room:
“To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
- If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.”
Notes on Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms:
“Telling the truth about feeling requires prodigious integrity.”
“Well, you see, there is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear’s reaction. Some poems, the eye can see nothing in them, literally, until they are read aloud. Basically, it would be fine if a poem could do both, but there are certain poems which will never do both, and are great poetry anyway.”
Favourites: 20th Century Invalid; Poet and Iceberg; Apprentice; Blouson Noir; April and the Ideas-Merchant; Badly-Chosen Lover; Done for!; The Drinkers of Coffee.
(The introduction gives some background into Tonks’ disappearance from the literary scene. I thought she was a noble but pathetic figure when I learned she went around destroying library copies of ‘The Bloater’. I was less impressed when she reduced a priceless Asian art collection to flinders. Bad vibe, Tonks.)
Running Away:
“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 cramed an Earth against my feet and
Pulled me over the bright rain
Storm of fleece.”
20th Century Invalid:
For to bite the dust anonymous
At night is twice as bitter
When the appetite is great.
Bedroom in an Old City:
“In the room with the water mark as rich
as sago on the wall, the young head of a minx
asleep sheds on cheap linen the pale silk hair
of baby Kensington.”
The Flaneur and the Apocalypse:
The Furies are modern, they don’t drive you they entice
With cafes, lovers, dusty streets … with the Apocalypse
‘Not this one – but the next,’ they hiss.”
Story of a Hotel Room:
“To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
- If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.”
Notes on Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms:
“Telling the truth about feeling requires prodigious integrity.”
“Well, you see, there is an excitement for the eye in a poem on the page which is completely different from the ear’s reaction. Some poems, the eye can see nothing in them, literally, until they are read aloud. Basically, it would be fine if a poem could do both, but there are certain poems which will never do both, and are great poetry anyway.”
Favourites: 20th Century Invalid; Poet and Iceberg; Apprentice; Blouson Noir; April and the Ideas-Merchant; Badly-Chosen Lover; Done for!; The Drinkers of Coffee.
May 22, 2015
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems, the gift of Rosemary Tonks.
Byline: Reprint from Subterranean Blue Poetry (www.subterraneanbluepoetry.com)
Title of Book: Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems
Author: Rosemary Tonks
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Date of Publication: 2014
Page Count: 154
“London calling . . .
I live by the river.“
- from London Calling by The Clash
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems is the newly published collection of work by Modernist British Poet, Rosemary Tonks. She was a woman of letters, working for the BBC writing Book Reviews, a Nigerian father who died before she was born, and childhood years spent in Nigeria to come to London when she was 18 years old. She married Michael (Micky) Lightband, at 20 years only to have the marriage eventually break. Celebrated in London for her books of poetry written in the 1960’s, she developed health issues in the 1970's and turned her back on the literatti, living as a “recluse” in rural England until she died at the age of 85 in 2014.
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems includes the 2 books of poetry Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms, Iliad of Broken Sentences and tucked in at the end are some prose pieces and an interview. The first book is a fantastical weave of dark and light, a story of demons, and love found yet lost. She paints the imagination, a very beautiful poet rolling around London streets at night, finding lovers in out of the way places, in the glow of the exotic hedonism of the 1960’s.
From Ace of Hooligans
“The blind rubbers of the mouth of love!
The awakening with citron store!
Morning: in a sty of tinted women.
She, on a quilt, bit roses; mammal pink.
He, a witch scab on his dream, left for infinity
While his soul peered out of his navel, hideous.”
The Poet seems to be engaging an interloculator in the background, as if someone or some conscript is possessed of great evil, as if there is a great struggle illuminated in the vagaries of love.
From, The Flanneur and the Apocalypse
“The Furies are modern, they don’t drive you they entice
With cafes, lovers, dusty streets . . . with the Apocalypse
‘Not this one – but the next,’ they hiss.”
And from, Gutter Lord
“My gutter – how you gleamed! Like dungeon floors which
Cobras have lubricated
Your time was kept in slimy yawns while you . . . “
and from Ace of Hooligans
“Beasts lit their eyes; the planet took in moth and dog.”
This Writer found captivating the pure light and beauty in imagery
From Rome
“It’s the jade-breath of the waterjar”
And from April and the Ideas – Merchant
“agate daylight”
that existed, breathed, entangled in darkness.
The exquisite and descriptive use of symbolism; imagery, the language and metaphor is magic. Flying with angels and grasping with demons, often in the same breath, the gritty dust of desert street heart falls and then flies up into the face of the sun. The poetry weaves trails of golden images of lost youth rolling around the streets of London by night. The Poet seems to borrow from Existentialism, the darkness, depression of Jean-Paul Sartre or the disease of Albert Camu’s, The Plague in the background juxtaposed with influences of the French Symbolist Poets of the 19th century.
From Bedouin of the London Morning
“We come into the café at dawn,
There are waterfogs, and civilization is white . . .
if you knew the exotic disgust that grips me
After another bestial night
As we come in, broken; dark with inks and dusts and gases
Like those whose private apartment is the street.”
and from, Poet as Gambler
“And all the ropes and fabrics of a boat!
Are heavy with cold nectars in the dawn,
Creation, glimmering and surly underfoot,
And Egypt drowsy on a cake of opium,
I went with nothing but the shirt upon my back
To cast lots with the Infinite,
And my bid was the blouse that rocks
On gamblers with a linen sail all night.”
Imagine the roar of the beast,
From On the advantage of being ill-treated by the World
“I have a quarrel with the world
Where my musician lodges
I need Adversity to break its claws!”
In the book of poetry Iliad of Broken Sentences, the poetry becomes a little more self-absorbed, as if she has written herself in the first person more into the poetry, a little more like narrative. There are allusions to Greek Mythology and some fantastical word juxtapositions, and the poetry has that kiss of promise. Sometimes it may be too wordy, but as in “Done for!” it presents itself well. This poem is a declaration, like the last scene of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Rocky in the swimming pool recounting reconcilliation and universal truths, she reveals, from Done for!
“Take care whom you mix with in life, irresponsible one,
For if you mix with the wrong people
And you yourself may be one of the wrong people –
If you make love to the wrong person
In some old building with its fabric of dirt,
As clouds of witchcraft, nitro glycerine, and cake
Brush by (one autumn night) still green
From our green sunsets . . . and then let hundreds pass, unlit,
They will do you ferocious, indelible harm!
Far beyond anything you can imagine, jazzy sneering one,
And afterwards you’ll live in no man’s land,
You’ll lose your identity, and never get yourself back, diablotin,
It may have happened already and as you read this . . .
Ah, it has happened already. I remember, in an old building;
Clouds which had cut themselves on a sharp winter sunset
(With its smoking stove of frosts to keep it cold)
went by, bleeding.”
Such promise in 2 slim tomes of poetry, it leaves one to wonder how such the gift would have ripened. Rosemary Tonks stopped writing in the 1970’s, her mother died unexpectedly, she developed health issues, her marriage broke and she retired to a small English village, having cut herself off from family and friends. Always, the beautiful blistered images of London Streets, the magic of youth and golden promise, a work of Classic Literature, Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Works by Rosemary Tonks.
Genre: Poetry, Women's Literature
Available @ Amazon.ca.
Byline: Reprint from Subterranean Blue Poetry (www.subterraneanbluepoetry.com)
Title of Book: Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems
Author: Rosemary Tonks
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Date of Publication: 2014
Page Count: 154
“London calling . . .
I live by the river.“
- from London Calling by The Clash
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems is the newly published collection of work by Modernist British Poet, Rosemary Tonks. She was a woman of letters, working for the BBC writing Book Reviews, a Nigerian father who died before she was born, and childhood years spent in Nigeria to come to London when she was 18 years old. She married Michael (Micky) Lightband, at 20 years only to have the marriage eventually break. Celebrated in London for her books of poetry written in the 1960’s, she developed health issues in the 1970's and turned her back on the literatti, living as a “recluse” in rural England until she died at the age of 85 in 2014.
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems includes the 2 books of poetry Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms, Iliad of Broken Sentences and tucked in at the end are some prose pieces and an interview. The first book is a fantastical weave of dark and light, a story of demons, and love found yet lost. She paints the imagination, a very beautiful poet rolling around London streets at night, finding lovers in out of the way places, in the glow of the exotic hedonism of the 1960’s.
From Ace of Hooligans
“The blind rubbers of the mouth of love!
The awakening with citron store!
Morning: in a sty of tinted women.
She, on a quilt, bit roses; mammal pink.
He, a witch scab on his dream, left for infinity
While his soul peered out of his navel, hideous.”
The Poet seems to be engaging an interloculator in the background, as if someone or some conscript is possessed of great evil, as if there is a great struggle illuminated in the vagaries of love.
From, The Flanneur and the Apocalypse
“The Furies are modern, they don’t drive you they entice
With cafes, lovers, dusty streets . . . with the Apocalypse
‘Not this one – but the next,’ they hiss.”
And from, Gutter Lord
“My gutter – how you gleamed! Like dungeon floors which
Cobras have lubricated
Your time was kept in slimy yawns while you . . . “
and from Ace of Hooligans
“Beasts lit their eyes; the planet took in moth and dog.”
This Writer found captivating the pure light and beauty in imagery
From Rome
“It’s the jade-breath of the waterjar”
And from April and the Ideas – Merchant
“agate daylight”
that existed, breathed, entangled in darkness.
The exquisite and descriptive use of symbolism; imagery, the language and metaphor is magic. Flying with angels and grasping with demons, often in the same breath, the gritty dust of desert street heart falls and then flies up into the face of the sun. The poetry weaves trails of golden images of lost youth rolling around the streets of London by night. The Poet seems to borrow from Existentialism, the darkness, depression of Jean-Paul Sartre or the disease of Albert Camu’s, The Plague in the background juxtaposed with influences of the French Symbolist Poets of the 19th century.
From Bedouin of the London Morning
“We come into the café at dawn,
There are waterfogs, and civilization is white . . .
if you knew the exotic disgust that grips me
After another bestial night
As we come in, broken; dark with inks and dusts and gases
Like those whose private apartment is the street.”
and from, Poet as Gambler
“And all the ropes and fabrics of a boat!
Are heavy with cold nectars in the dawn,
Creation, glimmering and surly underfoot,
And Egypt drowsy on a cake of opium,
I went with nothing but the shirt upon my back
To cast lots with the Infinite,
And my bid was the blouse that rocks
On gamblers with a linen sail all night.”
Imagine the roar of the beast,
From On the advantage of being ill-treated by the World
“I have a quarrel with the world
Where my musician lodges
I need Adversity to break its claws!”
In the book of poetry Iliad of Broken Sentences, the poetry becomes a little more self-absorbed, as if she has written herself in the first person more into the poetry, a little more like narrative. There are allusions to Greek Mythology and some fantastical word juxtapositions, and the poetry has that kiss of promise. Sometimes it may be too wordy, but as in “Done for!” it presents itself well. This poem is a declaration, like the last scene of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Rocky in the swimming pool recounting reconcilliation and universal truths, she reveals, from Done for!
“Take care whom you mix with in life, irresponsible one,
For if you mix with the wrong people
And you yourself may be one of the wrong people –
If you make love to the wrong person
In some old building with its fabric of dirt,
As clouds of witchcraft, nitro glycerine, and cake
Brush by (one autumn night) still green
From our green sunsets . . . and then let hundreds pass, unlit,
They will do you ferocious, indelible harm!
Far beyond anything you can imagine, jazzy sneering one,
And afterwards you’ll live in no man’s land,
You’ll lose your identity, and never get yourself back, diablotin,
It may have happened already and as you read this . . .
Ah, it has happened already. I remember, in an old building;
Clouds which had cut themselves on a sharp winter sunset
(With its smoking stove of frosts to keep it cold)
went by, bleeding.”
Such promise in 2 slim tomes of poetry, it leaves one to wonder how such the gift would have ripened. Rosemary Tonks stopped writing in the 1970’s, her mother died unexpectedly, she developed health issues, her marriage broke and she retired to a small English village, having cut herself off from family and friends. Always, the beautiful blistered images of London Streets, the magic of youth and golden promise, a work of Classic Literature, Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Works by Rosemary Tonks.
Genre: Poetry, Women's Literature
Available @ Amazon.ca.
November 6, 2024
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.
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.
May 14, 2020
Nope, sorry, not for me. I failed to connect with this in any way.
July 4, 2024
“I believe that certain conditions are necessary before an ordinary person can see a ghost. A tremendous inner pressure, or some suffering that has lowered your resistance, seem to be required. And the light was to he just right” (159)
August 5, 2015
For me, the best part of this work is the introduction and short biography of Tonks' life. She fascinates me. I don't particularly care for her work, but the woman herself intrigues me to no end. It is interesting to read about her at the same time that I am reading about Harper Lee. Two literary women who turned their backs on the world but in wildly different ways. Tonks spiritual journey is what grabs my attention. She followed a crooked path to what ended in extreme biblical Christianity and had some strange supernatural experiences along the way. I did find one poem that I loved in this collection, but I am afraid that is all. I think Mary Oliver has gotten under my skin and it will be tough for another poet to live up to that lofty standard. This is the one poem I appreciated:
Hypnos and Warm Winters
Europe is all steam and leaves and love-affairs!
Old streets - they're bathrooms of steam and water
Where Hypnos follows me all day in a silk dressing-gown,
Like two old bores we move through the great months of rain.
Suppose I'm coming form my love-affair…
While the steam-heated rain pours down,
And yawning takes the wax and starch out of my skin,
It's the last straw having to describe the night
Again in detail to my heart - as if it wasn't there,
When Hypnos, like a twentieth-century bachelor
Bored easily, is lying full length on my bed
- With the effrontery to add to his art the spice
Of fanning me to sleep - with sheets of my own verse.
Hypnos and Warm Winters
Europe is all steam and leaves and love-affairs!
Old streets - they're bathrooms of steam and water
Where Hypnos follows me all day in a silk dressing-gown,
Like two old bores we move through the great months of rain.
Suppose I'm coming form my love-affair…
While the steam-heated rain pours down,
And yawning takes the wax and starch out of my skin,
It's the last straw having to describe the night
Again in detail to my heart - as if it wasn't there,
When Hypnos, like a twentieth-century bachelor
Bored easily, is lying full length on my bed
- With the effrontery to add to his art the spice
Of fanning me to sleep - with sheets of my own verse.
March 29, 2016
I might have liked this when I was a younger man, but the poems mostly seem affected, callow, sincere emotion rendered poorly. But I applaud the collection enough to be happy I read it.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews