The Republic of the Husband

Description

Cover; Title Page; Dedication; Acknowledgements; Contents; I: The Children of First Marriages; Remembering the Children of First Marriages; Traction; Aunt Jane and the Scholar; Home County; 1976; During the Blitz; Zenith Automatic; Thin; One Day a Herd of Wild Horses Came into the Garden and Looked at My Mother; Estate; Phyllis Pearl Dawn; Cigarette Trees in Richmond Park; Lilian's Letter; Naming the Baby; Pantomime; Not Playing the Dane; From the Pantechnicon; II: The Republic of the Husband; The Effect of Spaceflight on the Female Body; Dolls in National Dress.;Lucy Tunstall's striking debut collection features a cast of characters ranging from Paul Muldoon and Marianne Moore to Aunt Jane, who fell in love ‘in 1956, or thereabouts', and Cousin Gillian, who keeps the family's long-case clock in her caravan (‘Some people do not think this an appropriate arrangement'). Using a variety of registers and forms, including dramatic monologue, lyric, collage and found text, Tunstall explores poetry's negotiations of truthfulness and theatricality, accuracy and artifice. Perceptive and humorous, but never sentimental, she reaches into the deep emotions th.