vulnerability in place of exquisitely dandified irony.

• +..darkwave


• +..surfing the dark wave


• +.. Industrial tinged techno

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Thus in that strange, upsetting poem ‘The Bee Meeting’, the detailed, doubtless accurate description of a gathering of local bee-keepers in her Devon village gradually becomes an invocation of some deadly ritual in which she is the sacrificial virgin whose coffin, finally, waits in the sacred grove. Why this should happen becomes, perhaps, slightly less mysterious when you remember that her father was an authority on bees; so her bee-keeping becomes a way of symbolically allying herself to him, and reclaiming him from the dead. The tone of all these late poems is hard, factual and, despite the intensity, understated. In some strange way, I suspect she thought of herself as a realist: the deaths and resurrections of ‘Lady Lazarus’, the nightmares of ‘Daddy’ and the rest had all been proved on her pulses. That she brought to them an extraordinary inner wealth of imagery and associations was almost beside the point, however essential it is for the poetry itself. Because she felt she was simply describing the facts as they had happened, she was able to tap in the coolest possible way all her large reserves of skill: those subtle rhymes and half-rhymes, the flexible, echoing rhythms and off-hand colloquialisms by which she preserved, even in her most anguished probing, complete artistic control. Her internal horrors were as factual and precisely sensed as the barely controllable stallion on which she was learning to ride or the car she had tried to smash up. So she spoke of suicide with a wry detachment, and without any mention of the suffering or drama of the act. It was obviously a matter of self-respect that her first attempt had been serious and nearly successful, instead of a mere hysterical gesture.
Alvarez, Al