Merry, our friends ramble on bitter-sweet
about `the inevitable decay of love',
inevitable as love's old sweet song --
some seasonal affair, a being burnt
like dead-heads at the garden end, year end.
one more . . .
 

from `Love's Old Sweet Song'
             

Tooting Idyll, Val Warner's first new collection in eleven years, includes two sequences, both set in London. The title poem's three monologues, each in a different form, focus on a south London terraced house in Tooting Bec inhabited by two male lovers (one a C.O., the other to become a soldier) coping with the social mores of June 1939 and the threat of war. In June 1984 the same house is lived in by a man and woman with an adopted child and another adoption fixed. The fate of the wartime lovers is implicit in the second part; the future of the 1980s couple is made explicit in the third, from the perspective of a cross-dressing female friend after the VE commemoration of 1995.

Mary Chay, the second sequence, focuses on a murder in Victoria in 1994, seen from many viewpoints (including those of the police, forensic laboratory staff, suspects, neighbours, witnesses, passers-by, a shop assistant, and a cross-dressing man who encounters the victim on her last day) and deploying a variety of poetic forms.