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New audience awaits the mysteriously absent Rosemary Tonks
ROSEMARY Tonks, the poet, disappeared from the luxurious home she shared with her banker husband Mickie in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, in the late 1970s.
Literary bloodhounds who have been trying to track her down ever since include poet JC Hall; Paul Keagan, poetry editor at Faber; and Neil Astley, who is Bloodaxe Books. Both Keagan and Astley want to publish her 46 poems in a collected volume. They have to have her permission, which isn’t forthcoming, and isn’t likely to be.
The vivacious blonde Tonks first had two slim volumes published that fizzled with passion and brio, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967). Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney started her needed revival in 1996 when they included two of her poems, “Badly Chosen Lover” – printed below – and “Hydromaniac” in their life-affirming anthology Emergency Kit – Poems for Strange Times (Faber).
Astley followed suit in more senses then one with two poems by Tonks in his anthology Staying Alive – real poems for unreal times (Bloodaxe Books 2002), “Badly-Chosen Lover” again, and “Addiction to an Old Mattress”. Can you tell me of any poet writing today who could have written poems that grab you by the neck and shake you till you awaken?
When I knew Tonks in the mid-1960s, she regularly steeped herself in the work of the French poets Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Cavafy, as if they were all straight out of the stories of the Arabian Nights. They were as far as she was concerned.
Two of her bibles which she constantly re-read were the Enid Starkie’s biographies of Rimbaud and Baudelaire.
Neil Astley reminded us at the end of poet Brian Patten’s Lost Voices Sunday afternoon programme on Radio 4 that Tonks is now 77, lives as a recluse in Sister Wendy Beckett-type isolation in a garden shed, having understandably not settled down at all well in a commune of hugging Christians, is profoundly “spiritual” (whatever that wretched word means), and has no idea there is a huge audience of young people in the 21st century awaiting to read her poems.
Badly Chosen Lover
Criminal, you took a great piece of my life,
And you took it under false pretences,
That piece of time
– In the clear muscles of my brain
I have the lens and jug of it!
Books, thoughts, meals, days, and houses,
Half Europe, spent like a coarse banknote,
You took it – leaving mud and cabbage stumps.
And, Criminal, I damn you for it (very softly).
My spirit broke her fast on you. And, Turk,
You fed her with the breath of your neck
– In my brain’s clear retina
I have the stolen love- behaviour.
Your heart, greedy and tepid, brothel-meat,
Gulped it like a flunkey with erotica.
And very softly, Criminal, I damn you for it.
Rosemary Tonks
JOHN HORDER
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