Bedouin of the London Evening – Rosemary Tonks
Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems & Selected Prose by Rosemary Tonks / ISBN 9781780373614 / paperback from Bloodaxe Books (UK)
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In the 1970s, after publishing two extraordinary poetry collections – and six satirical novels – Rosemary Tonks turned her back on the literary world after a series of personal tragedies and medical crises that made her question the value of literature and embark on a restless, self-torturing spiritual quest. This involved totally renouncing poetry and suppressing her own books. Her poetry–published in Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967)–is exuberantly sensuous, a hymn to sixties hedonism set amid the bohemian nighttime world of a London reinvented through French poetic influences and sultry Oriental imagery. All her published poetry is now available in this edition for the first time in over 40 years, along with a selection of her prose.
“A fragrant reopening of a bottle stoppered up forty years ago. As an amplification of the furibund poems that stood out a mile in the sheepish anthologies where they appeared.”–Poetry
“Tonks was a far superior poet – awesomely sick, wickedly goo…her ugliness is shot through with vital impropriety, a kind of punk feminism that subtly interrogates the empires of English poetry.”–Chicago Review
“Tonks consumed the city of London during the bohemian ’60s with more elan and euphoria than any British poet of her era.”–Rain Taxi
