Fiona Pitt-Kethley

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

Two Poems

Fiona Pitt-Kethley, 20 September 1984

Sex Objects

I learned from a friend’s porno mag that men can buy the better class of plastic doll (posh ones are hard and unyielding, not the pneumatic sort that fly from windows when they’re pricked), in slow instalments, torso first.

Well-qualified in wanking, Mark saves up his pennies till they grow to pounds and then invests in Ingrid, just the body, for his carnal press-ups...

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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