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“... who wants the typist’s side of this brief, bleak encounter might find a version of it in Rosemary Tonks’s poems, with their undertow of sexual menace and carnal scavenging. ‘Love Territory’, the opening poem of Bedouin of the London Evening, her new Collected (Bloodaxe, £12), starts: He’s timid with women, and the dusk is excruciating ...”

“... It wasn’t a “follow me” message. It was a quizzical, satirical: “You too?”’This is how Rosemary Tonks retells her ghostly visitation in The Halt during the Chase (1972), the last book she published before she disappeared from public life, like a true poète maudit, only to re-emerge after her death in 2014, when a full collection of her poems ...”

“... Stevie Smith after her stroke. There are disappearing acts (Weldon Kees) and changes of identity (Rosemary Tonks). The smoke of incinerated diaries – and, in Tonks’s case, a novel she claimed was the best thing she ever wrote – still hangs over some deaths. Some chapters are definitively less about the ...”

“... section called ‘Infidelity’ there are six poems, starting with ‘Story of a Hotel Room’ by Rosemary Tonks. ‘This poem should be read,’ the editor writes underneath, ‘by anyone about to embark on an affair thinking that it’s just a fling. It is much harder than you know to separate sex from love.’ Very often, an interest in what the poem ...”

“... mixed and would remain so throughout her career. Holladay refers to an ‘enigmatic’ review by Rosemary Tonks, but there’s nothing enigmatic about it: it is the frank confrontation of a poet of the Nerves with a poet of the Will: ‘In Miss Rich’s work, the moral proportions are valid, the protagonists are sane, responsible persons, and the themes ...”

“... our sense of safety tempts us to a dangerous exposure. As ‘Story of a Hotel Room’, a poem by Rosemary Tonks, sees it, But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing Because the bed of cold, electric linen Happens to be illicit . . . To make love as well as that is ruinous. Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us That without permanent ...”

“... John and his sister Gwen. They had come to London to study under the irascible but inspiring Henry Tonks and soon attracted a group of talented students around them. ‘Those Johns you know have a hold that never ceases,’ Ida wrote to a friend. She stayed for six years, working hard to be an artist and making friendships that lasted all her life. Among her ...”