Rosemary Tonks
Rosemary Tonks Poems
We talk openly, and exchange souls.
Power-shocks of understanding knock us off our feet!
The same double life among the bores and vegetables,
...
I swear that I would not go back
To pole the glass fishpools where the rough breath lies
That built the Earth - there, under the heavy trees
...
Thinking we were safe-insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
...
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.
...
No, this is not my life, thank God...
...worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;
Obsessed first by one person, an then
(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another:
...
I insist on vegetating here
In motheaten granduer. Haven't I plotted
Like a madman to get here? Well then.
...
I have lived it , and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.
...
His search is desperate!
And the little night-shops of the Underworld
With their kiosks...they know it,
The little bars as full of dust as a stake cake,
None of these places would exist without Orpheus
And how well they know it.
...
I shall fill up that pit inside me
With my gloomist thoughts; and then
Spread myself, prostrate, inert, on top of them.
...
Take care whom you mix with in life, irresponsible one,
For if you mix with the rong people
- And you yourself may be one of the wrong people -
If you make love to the wrong person.
...
I was leaning across your chest;
Like a marble-smith, I made pencilmarks over
Its vanilla skin, its young man's skin,
...
Outside that house, I stood like a dog;
The window was mysterious, with its big, dull pane
Where the mud pastes are thrown by dark, alkaline skies
That glide slowly along, keeping close to the ground.
...
I understand you, frightful epoch,
With your jampots, brothls, paranoias,
And your genius for fear, you can't stop shuddering.
Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.
...
Events pushed me into this corner;
I live in a fixed routine,
With my cardboard attaché case full of rotting books.
...If only I could trust my blood! Those damn foreign women
...
I was sitting upstairs in a bus, cursing the waste of time, and pouring my life away on one of those insane journeys across London - while gradually the wavering motion of this precarious glass salon, that flung us about softly like trusses of wheat or Judo Lords, began its medicinal work inside the magnetic landscape of London.
...
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.
...
Rosemary Tonks Biography
Rosemary Tonks (born 1932) is an English author and poet. She disappeared from the public eye after her conversion to Fundamentalist Christianity in the 1970s, and nothing is known about her life since. Early life Rosemary Tonks was born in London and educated at Wentworth School, London. Expelled in 1948, she published a children's story in the same year. She married at age 19, and the couple moved to Karachi, where she began to write poetry. Attacks of typhoid and polio forced a return to England. She later lived briefly in Paris. Career 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). Tonks stopped publishing poetry in the early 1970s, at about the same time as her conversion to a form of Christianity. Nothing is known publicly about her subsequent life. 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. A BBC Radio 4 Documentary aired on March 29, 2009 stated that Tonks had disappeared from public view and now lives a hermetic existence, refusing telephone and personal calls from friends, family and the media.)
The Best Poem Of Rosemary Tonks
The Drinkers Of Coffee
We talk openly, and exchange souls.
Power-shocks of understanding knock us off our feet!
The same double life among the bores and vegetables,
By lamplight in the coffee-houses you have sat it out
Half toad, half sultan, of the rubbish-heap,
You know the dealy dull excitement; the champage sleet
Of living; you know all the kitchen details of my ego's thinking,
When, with our imaginations shuddering.
We move arrogantly into one another's power,
And the last barriers go down between us....
More at home in a jazz pit than with you,
Hotter on the Baltic, when it fries in ice,
Better understood by cattle, grocers, blocks of wood,
My refrigerated body feels the coffin's touch in every word
You utter, and backs away forever from your bed.
You know me far too well, O dustbin of the soul;
My sex, her nerve completely broken by it, has constructed
Barriers, thick walls, never to be battered down.
On the other side (with a last mouthful of the double-dutch to spit!)
She looks away; and in a wholly opposite direction.
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4/24/2024 2:11:32 AM # 1.0.0.1119
pls share her poems................ they are worth readable unlike the most. Regards L.Rao