Fiona Pitt-Kethley has published more than twenty books of prose and poetry.
My first years were haunted by foreign names, phrases like ‘apostolical succession’ and strange invasions of dressed-up prelates. After a quick ordination, blessing or what have you in the chapel, they’d go out the back to take their photographs. (I liked the geometry of our garden – first, the square washing-line that wouldn’t spin, then...
Next door but one’s being converted into luxury flats. Some weeks back, a dead rat appeared in the road outside. His body seemed to be pointing in the direction of our house. Luckily, he didn’t make it.
My cousin sent a baby doll for me – hairless and clammy, waxen yellowish-grey with sunken pale blue eyes and a mouth pursed for pouring water in so it came out through a small aperture between its legs.
I called it Peter though it had no prick – it looked too ugly for a girl I thought. I used to fill it up and souse my lap. Sometimes I’d press its squashy latex head to force...
Virtuous women are those who do not sell themselves too cheap or give themselves for free. In Solomon, the virtuous woman’s price is set far above rubies, we all know. What kind of rubies though? Idol’s-eye-size? Or just small chips in an engagement ring?
A friend of mine has got this man at work – her ‘sugar daddy’. He saves up for weeks to take her out for...
Men are the ones that have the headaches now. Back in my mother’s day, when girls said no most of the time, they were all after it – or so they said – in pain with their erections. But now we call their bluff by answering yes, the truth is out – they want it less than us.
Most of my female friends are on the pill, willing, good-looking too. What do we get? Men who...
There are really only two things people want to keep from public scrutiny: their real, private self; or the fact that they have no private self of any particular interest. Now, my instinctive...
Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s favourite novel is a 16th-century Chinese work called Chin P’ing Mei. This book, she believes, was written as an act of vengeance. The author imbued each of the...
Richard Rayner's new novel, his second, opens with a nervous exhibition of rhetorical trills and twitches, buttonholing the reader like a stand-up comic on his first night: ...
Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...
Almost every woman I know has at one time or another been to bed with a man she shouldn’t have been to bed with – a married man, a friend’s man or, quite simply, a man who...
So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...
Amy Clampitt is a most spirited and exhilarating performer. An enormous appetite for observation and zeal to describe precisely what she has observed are transmitted through both the best and the...
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