Photograph by Martin Copley

Carole Coates

I started writing poetry in the late 80s, but it's a slow business when there are so many other things to do – like earning a living. Shoestring Press published my first collection The Goodbye Edition in 2005 and will be publishing my second, Looking Good in the summer of 2009. I've had quite a few poems published in magazines and I've done many readings. Looking Good contains a sequence of poems about anorexia. I hadn't intended a sequence when I wrote the first one but I found it very easy to carry on writing and exploring the situation I found myself in during my early twenties. I've become more and more interested in the concept of the poetry sequence and am involved in writing a narrative sequence at the moment.

I've found the SixPoets to be a most supportive environment for a poet. Over the last five years we have written together, listened to each other's work, given readings and organised readings for ourselves and others. And we've had a huge amount of fun.

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The Hurst

I've sketched the house and I've described it,
looked at it for an hour but still don't like it.

Don't ask me why – perhaps the shuttered glass,
the dull grey rendering of the upper storey,
the way the gables end in spears,
the central flourish of the fleur-de-lys
or maybe it's because someone's just died.

I like the little rococo nude statue.
At first she's all grey bottom and coy head
with something slung over her back like wings.

They're draperies – she's holding up her dress,
her face is side-turned, anxious.
She could be trying to avoid a wave
that would upend her, forfeit all her grace.
But she's doing this already,
baring her body, saving her dress.
Who else has run his finger down her nose?

She stands in the swing of the lawn
before this strange mask of a house
where an angry man lived once who cursed his wives.
Feminists didn't like him – I was one.
We were prejudiced, no doubt.
I know I made a point of it.

There is a gracious space between the statue and the steps
(actually, that statue is unseemly –
what is she trying to avoid to go to such extremes?)
The space between has some significance.

Yes, a photo of him there with one of his wives (Jill?).
He was talking about suspender belts and satin underwear
or was it silk? and he sneered at women he found unattractive.
It's still there in the space between the statue and the steps.

I remember an ancient colonel in York who said
Well, of course women are sex objects.
You've only got to look at them.
He was a sweet man who looked surprised
when everyone suddenly burst out laughing.
This was a long time ago and who is so innocent now?

So what are we to do, what options do we have –
we old ladies still with sweetness in our bones?
Or do we care and should we care
here in Shropshire when the sun is shining?
This house is male and I think it's dying.

(This was one of the Commended Poems in the Arvon International Poetry Competition Anthology 2004. It also appears in The Goodbye Edition , Shoestring 2005.)