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Tooting Idyll

Val Warner

Cover Picture of Tooting Idyll
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • 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.
    VAL WARNER read Modern History at Oxford and has worked as a teacher, freelance copy-editor and freelance writer. She was Creative Writing Fellow at the University College of Swansea and Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee. She has received a Gregory Award. Her Carcanet publications include the pamphlet These ... read more
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