Description
Book SynopsisEleanor Brown’s first collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, included her much anthologised “girlfriend’s revenge” poem ‘Bitcherel’ along with a widely praised sequence of fifty love and end-of-love sonnets written during her 20s. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, appearing three decades later, draws on the lives of women of all ages. Taking her title from the idea that when a woman writes about her experience as a woman, ‘she writes in white ink’ (Hélène Cixous), Eleanor Brown wanted to inscribe, among other things, the unseen labour of endowing infants with their mother tongue, their birthright of speech and language skills – the babbling, cooing, phonic repetition, echolalia, chanting of nonsense-words, singing of lullabies, nursery rhymes, counting rhymes, clapping songs, and telling of bedtime stories that is often the invisible and unrecorded work of women with pre-school-age children. A number of these poems were written in response to interviews made for the Reading Sheffield oral history project. Eleanor Brown spent over a year listening to recordings before starting to write these poems, some of which stay very faithful to the speaker’s own words, while others travel further into an imaginative or active, poetic listening; these are the poems she heard not in what was said, but in pauses, intonations, emphasis, whispers, asides, digressions and deflections.
Trade ReviewEleanor Brown's breathtaking début collection… she displays the sharp wit of a Molière, with graceful, cerebral rhymes that leave a bitter aftertaste. Ever insightful and enormously funny, she juxtaposes moving descriptions with killer punchlines. * Time Out, on Maiden Speech *
Rarely have I read so refreshing and engaging a first collection. On display are wit, wordplay and an exhilarating flexibility of rhyme and rhythm. Alongside a barmaid's address to "the Lads" is a succulent celebration of a wedding-cake. Jaundiced Sirens laconically slide closing couplets in, like rapiers. A subtly sustained and cunningly crafted sonnet sequence, assessing an affair, comprises the last rites it abjures. Love's assumptions are laid bare after the manner of a female Catullus or Alceste. Mistress of the telling phrase, Eleanor Brown seems as joyously drawn to her themes, and their expression, "as music draws a dancer". -- Stewart Conn
Table of Contents9 Representation 10 She’s Going in an Office like her Daddy 12 This is My Own Bit of Thing 14 Appetite 15 What Would You Put Dracula Under? 16 Heroes I 17 Girls Don’t Need to be Educated, They Get Married 18 Location Location Location 19 Honeymoon 20 Nice Murders 22 Damsel-fly 23 The Dressmaker 25 A Tragedy on Every Page 27 Fast-talking Girl 28 The Empress and the Golden Swan 30 Verbatim 31 Friends 33 Sleepovers 34 The one that I came in with 35 Good Smells 36 Assistant Librarian 38 Wannabe 1938 39 Unsatisfied Requests 40 All the Little Mermaids 41 Fen Jenny 42 The Changeling 43 White Ink 44 Helpless with Laughter 45 North Staveley Songbird 46 A Broken Heart or Something Like It 48 Why Is the Skull Crying 49 A Burning 51 Good Hunting 52 Blood Sugar 53 Snatches of Old Lauds 55 Heroes II 56 A Lot of Schoolboy Stories 57 The Jig-borer 58 The Tracer 60 Blue Rain 61 War Quartet 63 Bledewort 66 Chess Queen’s Letters Home 70 Poem on the Underground 72 Acknowledgements
