Rosemary Tonks (1928–2014)

What a lark! So glad to have snagged a copy of this book from Interlibrary Loan and listened to the Backlist Podcast. Min is a classic female character in this delightful confection of the Sixties as she copes with her opera singer admirer called The Bloater ("this huge, tame, exotic man" "I personally can smell him from the kitchen...I do see that he is large and washing takes time") lusts after a coworker named Billy, gossips with friends and an inciteful neighbor ("he has property, knows show more everything, and occasionally tells me near-truths about myself.") She pretty much ignores her husband, George. She suffers from gout and is absorbed by her clothing, her home décor and her cleaner, occasionally her job in electronic music, but mostly is concerned with her love life. When her husband complains, "I am bewildered, and my ego falls down off her plinth." Fun to read. A closing salvo from Min: "I'm able to put up with the present only by attaching it to the future." show less

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 show more 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." show less

One of our cats is called Tonks — she had the misfortune to be grabbed off the streets of Denver during a period the shelter was naming all its rescues after Harry Potter characters. Bringing Tonks home in spring 2012 was my introduction to Tonks. My introduction to her literary namesake came shortly after, when I read two of her poems in an anthology and was taken enough with them to buy Bedouin of the London Evening. But it turned out I liked the feline Tonks more than the poetical show more one.

This novel is a too hip for its own good swinging sixties Bridget Jones's Diary, substituting an arch, dismayingly self-conscious wittiness for BJ's self-deprecation. Aided by the obligatory gay friend and girl friend, our heroine, Min, weighs the merits and demerits — mostly the latter — of several suitors (including her husband who buries himself in his dusty academical work in the British Museum instead of enduring her relentless flippancy) over the course of a few days. One of the guys keen to get in her pants is the titular fat bastard, a famous bore of an opera singer whom Min strings along for 125 pages or so before flirting herself out, and that's your lot. Like its characters, and in my opinion its time, this book is very slight.

Unlike Tonks the cat. show less

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 show more 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. show less