Search Results

“... 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 the dancers swallowed belladonna ...”

“... There’s a place on the road coming down from the hills where rows of oyster frames unfurl on an indigo sea like a pattern of bamboo fans or blocks of pale embroidery on a geisha’s kimono, whose knees and shoulders press against the border of the wood engraving tight as Alice’s when she started growing. The high-piled mass of the dead volcano cone is her oiled and twisted hair fighting free from its combs to tangle in the shell- encrusted poles ...”

“... 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, galaxies and Magellanic clouds; feels like a photograph of particles halted in a cyclotron and magnified a thousand powers, a microscopic re-enactment of the planet’s coming total fracture, elements dispersing out in space ...”

“... This jar of rosy-purple jam is labelled Early Rivers, August ’82 – the date I made it, the name the farmer gave those plums, smooth as onyx eggs, but warmer. The dimpled groove, bloom-dusted, down each fuit pouted at the touch of my knife, yielding the stone I put inside a cotton sock (relict of a worn-out pair – every boiling dyed it darker crimson – from one plum-season to the next I saved it) then pushed the lumpy tied-up bag into the centre of the pulpy amber halves and melting sugar in the preserving kettle, and let the mixture ooze its pectins, odours, juices, flavours, until the chemistry of time and fire produced this sharpness, sweetness, that I’m eating now, straight from the jar, smearing my mouth, digging the spoon in deeper, seeking a taste undiluted even by nostalgia ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 the room between us, I saw her reflection, pale as an ocean creature, floating deep in the dressing-table mirror over splinters of sun from the jumble of bottles and jars – stern eyes seeming to dare me closer ...”

“... 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, crouched into a broken wicker chair, I peered up through the basement window ...”

“... From the roof of her under-reef den a giant Pacific octopus – whose suckered legs are metres long, who changes tone when curious from glowing white to glorious red – hangs a hundred thousand eggs clumped into strands, like clusters of grapes painted on the ceiling of Sennefer’s tomb at Luxor. ‘The rough surface of rock makes the vine-tendrils and fruit more realistic ...”

“... i Trying to describe a colour by comparison and metaphor is as futile as the attempt to hum the tune I hear in my head. But I thought everyone knew what was meant by sugar-paper blue. Sugar-paper – that thickish, stiffish somewhat-grainy-surfaced, mottled faded-navy paper glued or folded into bags for sugar: the next image is my aunt and mother sticky-fingered in the family grocery store ...”

“... In Palazzo Mocenigo where he lived alone Lord Byron used every grand room To watch solitude mirror by mirror And the beauty of doors no one passed through He heard the marine murmurs of silence The lost echoes of steps in far corridors He loved the smooth shine on polished floors Shadows unrolling under high ceilings And though he sat in just one c ...”

“... but then he didn’t have to survive Stalin – and Kornei Chukovsky did, triumphantly.Poetry by Ruth Fainlight, Ted Hughes, Blok; more fiction, by Elaine Feinstein, John Sladek, Tim Owens; some cheerfully itchy artwork by Pamela Zoline, Rolf Brandt, and others; so much accomplishment, so much mere febrility. It’s unamiable, not to be ignored, and ...”

“... Johnston has more in common with women poets writing today like Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens and Ruth Fainlight. His verses, like theirs, have nothing against being simple, forceful and straightforward. Modern mannered poets show a latent anxiety about the poem not quite coming off which is quite absent in ...”

“... ashes.’ Yet Plath continued to wear the shirt-waister dresses, hats and gloves that reminded Ruth Fainlight when she met her of ‘one of my New York aunts dressed for a cocktail party’. The suggestion that she was dressing for a part she couldn’t play is perhaps a little glib. There was something in those clothes that was her; she was also the ...”

“... when the boys asked the Cumaean sybil what she wanted she replied: ‘I want to die!’ Not so Ruth Fainlight’s sybils: they want to live, difficult and perplexing though their lives are. But then the Cumaean sybil was held captive, whereas Fainlight’s speak and behave with the authority of Gravesian ...”

“... and was amazed and delighted by it. Less than four months before she killed herself, she wrote to Ruth Fainlight: ‘I am living like a Spartan, writing through huge fevers and producing free stuff I had locked in me for years. I feel astounded and very lucky. I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart, but that is ...”