Margot Myers has a PhD in fairy tales which explains, in part, her eye for key details and feel for characterisation. She can give the essence of a life in a crisp snapshot. This, from The Sex Life of Aunts, is her mother’s grandmother, who:

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would cast off
her corset at closing time

and leave it on the settee, like the shell

of an old lobster, so as to quell

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any passion.

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Auntie Dolly, widowed, “... played the piano in chapel // and wore his departed mother’s hats”. There’s a child- like observation here, where every- thing is equal and grown-ups are to be wondered at but never questioned. This clarity has a slightly surreal quality in its sharpness and precision, and Myers maintains this in her prose poem Peckham, 1944:

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On the day Woolworths is obliterated in a V2 attack, Dad makes

a salad with spinach leaves and nasturtium. Old Mrs Pittard Upstairs

walks past the kitchen window with her chamber pot.

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In two short paragraphs, similar to flash fiction, life gleams on the page, vivid and unarguable. Housewives’ Choice opens memorably: “In that kitchen nappies boiled like puddings, / hung damp from the ceiling, the iron spat on my father’s shirts”. You can feel the clammy air, hear the crackle of spit; it’s both her memory and simultaneously the feel of my own childhood. The Conquest of Everest, 1953 is not the expected celebration of national triumph but the more significant childhood memory:

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It’s the year our chimney catches fire.

Next-door and my dad climb the roof to its snow-ridge summit

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because it’s there, lob snowballs down the smoking flue

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Fifteen poems in an elegantly-designed pamphlet; they are well worth exploring.

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D A Prince