Fiona Pitt-Kethley

Fiona Pitt-Kethley has published more than twenty books of prose and poetry.

Letter

Duw, Duw

4 November 1993

I thoroughly enjoyed Lorna Sage’s account of her childhood in the last three issues (LRB, 7 October, LRB, 21 October and LRB, 4 November. I would like to correct her on one point, though. The ‘Dew, Dew,’ uttered by her Welsh grandmother is spelt ‘Duw, Duw’ and means ‘God, God!’ not ‘Deary me!’ Welsh is singularly short of any non-religious expletives – one reason my poetry could...
Letter

Duw, Duw

21 October 1993

I thoroughly enjoyed Lorna Sage’s account of her childhood in the last three issues (LRB, 7 October, LRB, 21 October and LRB, 4 November. I would like to correct her on one point, though. The ‘Dew, Dew,’ uttered by her Welsh grandmother is spelt ‘Duw, Duw’ and means ‘God, God!’ not ‘Deary me!’ Welsh is singularly short of any non-religious expletives – one reason my poetry could...
Letter

Duw, Duw

7 October 1993

I thoroughly enjoyed Lorna Sage’s account of her childhood in the last three issues (LRB, 7 October, LRB, 21 October and LRB, 4 November. I would like to correct her on one point, though. The ‘Dew, Dew,’ uttered by her Welsh grandmother is spelt ‘Duw, Duw’ and means ‘God, God!’ not ‘Deary me!’ Welsh is singularly short of any non-religious expletives – one reason my poetry could...
Letter

Even bags can fly

24 June 1993

I was intrigued and a little puzzled by several phrases in Hugo Williams’s poems based on his schooldays (LRB, 24 June). In ‘Guilt’ he writes: ‘he caught me in bed with another boy.’ When I was friends with Hugo he told me that there was no homosexuality in Eton, only a lot of talk about it – a story which doesn’t quite tally with what I’ve heard from other old Etonians. Perhaps, though,...

Poem: ‘Designer Sex’

Fiona Pitt-Kethley, 8 April 1993

(For D.)

You’ve made yourself a master of the art of touch. You play me like an instrument. While I lie passively, as you prefer – eyes closed, you’d rather that I didn’t watch – your fingers (unobserved) combine to seem like other things. Your subtlety deceives.

This time I’m on my front and sneak a look ... I see your hands, then the illusion breaks....

Don’t

Jenny Diski, 5 November 1992

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...

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How long?

Hilary Mantel, 27 February 1992

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...

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Rites of Passage

Anthony Quinn, 27 June 1991

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: ...

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What the doctor said

Edna Longley, 22 March 1990

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...

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Promises

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 10 November 1988

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...

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Out of the blue

Mark Ford, 10 December 1987

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...

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Here comes Amy

Christopher Reid, 17 April 1986

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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