Fiona Pitt-Kethley

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

Letter

Let down

8 October 1992

Dick Hill asks (Letters, 19 November): ‘On what basis does Ms Pitt-Kethley assume that the hedgehog of which she writes so feelingly is male?’ I assumed he was male because ‘Harry Houdini’ was the proud possessor of a penis, an inch and a quarter in length. I have not done research on the mensuration of animal genitalia, but I should imagine he was rather well-endowed – better, I might add,...

Poem: ‘My Prickly Friend’

Fiona Pitt-Kethley, 8 October 1992

Returning from a party late at night I went to use the basement loo and saw a mass of heaving spikes and bright black eyes and swore I’d never touch champagne again until I realised that it was real – a hedgehog struggling in the lavatory pan.

I held a walking-stick – he grabbed the end and wrapped his body round it like a ball. (He didn’t smell too good when he came...

Letter

‘Sex’

24 September 1992

At the risk of being called ‘an egotistical monomaniac’ once more by Alan Rudrum (Letters, 24 September), may I burden your pages again? I would like this time, instead of talking about myself, to offer some advice to Hugo Williams after reading his poem ‘Sex’ in the same issue. While I am relieved to find that he does know the basic facts of life, I think he could do with a little more knowledge...
Letter

Splash

23 July 1992

I thoroughly enjoyed Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, reviewed by John Bayley in the issue of 23 July. I have often been compared to Byron in reviews – probably more because critics wish to call me ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ than for any real resemblance in my work. I would have to admit that I share certain temperamental characteristics with him, though...

Poem: ‘‘Expense of Spirit’’

Fiona Pitt-Kethley, 9 January 1992

‘Shakespeare’s a good psychologist,’ I’d said – a casual remark, post-mortemised by the historian I was talking to. ‘He couldn’t be – psychology’s a science that wasn’t even invented in his day ... Shakespeare showed feeling for his fellow man!’ (He told me what he thought I’d meant to say.) I felt the sofa wasn’t...

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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