Ruth Fainlight

Ruth Fainlight’s collections include Sybils and Others and Somewhere Else Entirely. Her New and Collected Poems appeared in 2010.

Poem: ‘Poppies’

Ruth Fainlight, 3 September 1987

A bed of them looks like a dressing-room backstage after the chorus changed costume,

ruffled heaps of papery orange petticoats and slick pink satin bodices.

Every petal’s base is marked with the same confident black smear as a painted eyelid

and the frill of jostling purple anthers sifts a powdery kohl that clogs the lashes

shading watchful glances from dilating pupils, as though all...

Poem: ‘Like Manet’s ‘Olympe’’

Ruth Fainlight, 19 December 1985

Like Manet’s ‘Olympe’, naked in the afternoon heat and manilla-shaded light, my aunt lay on the green watered-silk of her bedspread. Smooth hair, proud head, short but shapely legs and high breasts were so much the same as the painting I had just fallen in love with, that I faltered, still half in the doorway, almost afraid to enter.

Through one moted beam that cut across...

Poem: ‘My Fuchsia’

Ruth Fainlight, 15 November 1984

My fuchsia is a middle-aged woman who’s had fourteen children, and though she could do it again, she’s rather tired.

All through the summer, new blooms. I’m amazed. Yet the purple and crimson have paled. Some leaves are yellowed or withering.

The new buds look weaker and smaller, like menopause babies. But still she’s a gallant fine creature performing her function.

...

Poem: ‘Death’s Love-Bite’

Ruth Fainlight, 6 May 1982

A slow-motion explosion is what my mouth’s become, front teeth thrusting forward at impossible angles. Incisors once in satisfactory alignment cruelly slice through lips and tongue, and molars grind each other into powder. Though it took almost thirty years for them to drift so far apart, the pace accelerates. My mouth contains meteors and molecules, the splintered bones of mastodons,...

Poem: ‘Lost Drawing’

Ruth Fainlight, 17 July 1980

Bare winter trees in silhouette against a clear cold turquoise sky just after sunset: during the war, at my aunt’s house in Virginia, I tried to draw them – trees like these in England which she never saw – and now, trees in my garden make me feel the first true pang of grief since her death.

Between the wash-tubs and storecupboards filled with pickled peaches and grape-jam,...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing...

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Accessibility

Derek Mahon, 5 June 1980

It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that I have taken the full measure, or anything like it, of Middleton’s Carminalenia, an intensely difficult collection about as far removed from...

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