Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Selected Poems

Song of the Nymphomaniac
Fiona Pitt-Kethley
  
From Baffin Bay down to Tasmania
I’ve preached and practised nymphomania,
Had gentlemen of all complexions,
All with varying erections:
Coalmen, miners, metallurgists,
Gurus, wizards, thaumaturgists,
Aerial artists, roustabouts,
Recidivists and down-and-outs,
Salesmen, agents, wheeler-dealers,
Dieticians, nurses, healers,
Surgeons, coroners and doctors,
Academics, profs and proctors,
Butchers, bakers, candle-makers,
Airmen, soldiers, poodlefakers,
Able seamen, captains, stokers,
Tax-inspectors, traders, brokers,
Preachers, canons, rural deans,
Bandy cowboys fed on beans,
Civil-servants, politicians,
Taxidermists and morticians.
I like them young, I like them old,
I like them hot, I like them cold.
Yet, I’m no tart, no easy lay –
My name is Death. We’ll meet one day.
  
  
 
‘Song of the Nymphomaniac’ is included in Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2008).
 
Read more about Fiona and her Selected Poems here.
 
Visit Fiona’s blog.

Serious writers and solemn writers

“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer.  A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

– Ernest Hemingway

On Borders

“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.”

– Marya Mannes,
  Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times (George Braziller, 1959)

Jeanette Winterson writes about her father’s death

“When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”

– Jeanette Winterson

Read Jeanette Winterson’s January column on the death of her father here.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz

“The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.”

– Faiz Ahmed Faiz