Elastic Glue

Kathy Pimlott

• Publisher: The Emma Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781912915071
• eBook ISBN: 9781912915088
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Here you'll find revellers, developers and dealers circling the city's glitzy heart, Lenin inspecting Swedish allotments, and people hanging on to housing as the city tries to squeeze them out in the search for ever more profit. Elastic Glue is a pamphlet rooted in place, looking critically at the intersections of who and what we share our spaces with, and what that means. This follow-up to Goose Fair Night examines the ways we own and are owned by land – how we both make and are made by the places we inhabit. Kathy Pimlott explores this through poetry which is sharp, lyrical, always political, and sometimes just exasperated.

What I learnt behind bars

The Manvers Arms

I never saw the exotic dancer’s snake,

being deemed too green for the hurly-burly

of the public bar and consigned upstairs

to the lounge, to ferry steaks au poivre

and cherries jubilee from the echoing kitchen

where a solitary boy in whites dropped

plastic sachets into water at a rolling boil

and gave up trying before he’d even started.

To a woman, the lady diners despised me

in my pink satin hot pants with the butterfly

appliqué. They were right. It wasn’t a uniform,

nobody made me wear them but I had the legs.

The Flying Horse

I was filling in the rest of that last summer

when those Aussie lads we’d met

on the Piazzale Michelangelo

during the earth tremor

took us at our word,

hopped over to England and popped by.

It was several years until I came to see

that when the tidy men in the intimate bar

by the door had sighed I was lucky,

it hadn’t been on account of my fabulous tan

or hair so straight it didn’t need ironing

but because of those ragamuffin boys

who swept in and swept me up

in their loud glory, lighting every corner

with their shameless brio.

The Dover Castle

A solicitor called Christian owned the Dover Castle

and lived above with his largely incidental wife

who rose at six to make miniature shepherd’s pies.

He had another round the corner but, it was agreed,

the Castle was the classier. By noon it was full

of doctors and the BBC drinking vodka and tonic.

On hot days he’d turn off the pumps and offer

only continental bottled beers to quench the thirst

of consultants, commissioning editors and engineers

sweating in the mews. If we had cucumbers,

he’d make up a jug of Pimms. In the afternoons

we bottled up, counted pennies from the machines

and American Annie whose husband was on the rigs

would explain how heroin was good for colds

but cocaine was a safer everyday choice

and Mitti would rail against the gracelessness

of English men. Of an evening it was quiet,

just regulars: a psychiatrist from Harley Street,

who specialised in Catholic guilt, drank

until he liquefied, and the man in the stetson

practiced being inscrutable over Jack Daniels.

Tipster Laurie, fresh from the courses, in thrall

to hard-hearted Mitti, could be coaxed into sending

a taxi for ice-cream as the dullness wore on,

soaked in scotches drawn from six optics, all filled

from the big bargain bottle. When David Warner,

in his Morgan years, sat on the step, head in hands,

I offered him the solace of the poster for his Hamlet

which had graced my teenage wall and agreed

that neither of us should be here. A man who said

he’d designed the packaging for Winalot invited me

to late supper at the Hard Rock Café and I went.

It seemed starry but really it was just sticky carpet work.

The Fancy

Those parakeets, they’d talk, especially the solitary males.

Let out to flit around the room, they’d settle on pelmets.

We’d bat them down with a copy of Woman’s Realm.

Forget a window and they’d be off, leaving us to imagine them

harassed by duller local birds. No longer. In bullish flocks

they fly all along the Thames, right up to Hyde Park and beyond.

They escaped from the Twickenham set of The African Queen

or Ji...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Titles From The Emma Press
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• They count on you getting tired, giving up
• Seven Dials: The Rookery Redux
• Site of Special Scientific Interest
• Music & Movement
• When we were shortlifers in The Bury
• Socialist Activist Anna Lindhagen
• Ruby Wedding: what it’s like
• Charles Boff’s Comprehensive Guide
• Revelations
• Taxonomy
• Covent Garden’s garden
• What I learnt behind bars
• The Fancy
• Cold Spell
• The Ballad of St Giles Central
• Going to the Algerian Coffee Store: 500g Esotico
• The Consultant Placemaker does Seven Dials
• Remedies against Enemies
• The ironmonger’s a vintage clothes shop now
• Atomic Strip
• A Visit to the Master of Space and Light
• Acknowledgements