Tilla Brading
Some kind of accretion has occurred, gathering the tatters of old bodices, peeping through the crewel eye of tapestry and the lace-worked veil, snapping hoops of crinolines, bones of gussets, fashion statements
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Disturbing the peace
Lonely dissenter discovering
things of value hidden from view
A garden inclosed is my
sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed
Outside the paradigm
From coptic embroidery
to my bustle encrusted with
jewels
written into the rondels of
Exeter Cathedral
tent stitch cross stitch rice stitch half-cross crosslet straight stitch
eyelet stitch gobelin basket weave
long-armed cross-stitch straight gobelin algerial eye stitch
continental stitch hungarian satin stitch montenegrin cross stitch diagonal parisian stitch
the soft
persuasion of toadstools
bursts solid concrete
d t
i r
s a
a d
p i
p t
o i
i o
n n
t a
e l
d
w p
i o
t e
h t
i
c
s
Sara,
illegible to other eyes
a muted story
distinctly minor
so much left
unrecorded
part of the heard melodies
of Great Men
shadow of a brilliant
father
putting in order
his literary house;
keeping her husband’s house
(in order)
silent heroine whose
muffled story
haunts
marginalised by sex
(exemplifies her meaning
in the little tale
included in parenthesis)
unfinished Masterpiece
miscellaneous
remains
slipped
from the formalist
hierarchy of Art
the interesting fragment ends.
dots intervene
in inability to make (to
do
what might have been
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Craft the soft persuasion
of wool
As stone in a man's world
In what does man's
pre-eminence over the brute creation consist?
Reason
(subjugate the [true]
impulses of language)
Employ reason to justify
prejudices.
For what purpose were
the passions implanted?
"He heard the slight
creak of her corset as she breathed"
A woman must have time in a room of her own if she is to write.
Tommy was a control freak;
he kept Maria captive in her mansion. She wasn't allowed to be free. Sitting in
his castle, he'd say,
"If you
deal with Maria, I'm not dealing with you anymore".
The things he'd done to
rubbish her career.
Concrete poetry poppies
(peeping again) where Land
Girls weep
engrave memorials
beyond wasted Flander's
fields
No such thing as a silenced artist?
Two women have been |  |
arrested |
items for cutting/damaging t h e f
e n ce
plank palings crystal ball
…. Chaining themselves to railings
the hearse under the horse
(cut fences, break boundaries)
With the presumption of youth
"Sometimes she even longed for the company of her absent husband even though his selfish, uncaring attitude killed all the love and admiration she once had for him".
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The girls swing their legs and sing
to the tramp of the 22 men
skipping out of step,
swirling and poking out their tongues
Who's this?
Girl in a slanting khaki beret;
the male exemplar,
arrested for loutish behaviour.
If that's what you want,
Power-dressed
In a pin-stripe suit
Grinning under the barrister's wig
What I especially disliked about Mrs Thatcher was her male attributes.
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claire short estelle morris mo molem
silk, chiffon and some rounded flesh
robins hop among shouting starlings
she has refused to be tamed
I'm a Jean Paul Gaultier art object ….
With a tea cosy on my head
Miss Tress peoples literature
botox reconstruction
a perpetual simper
(I'll bet the surgeon's a man)
The Ladies Football team
is kicking against the knitting
unpicking grandma's tapestry
neat religious stitching
sugary verse of the
cake decoration class
unravelling the skein
untying the knot
(she cut off her waist-length plaits
when she left home)
OUT OF EVERYWHERE
monk's hooded,
translating histories and hype
losing the thread
tangled thesis
Where are we?
all and none of this entanglement
looking across the pond
at the glittering boat
bobbing bobbins
always a little ahead
only to discover
Titanic presumption
swing low sweet in the
lyric hammock
plaited in knotted rope
dis-gendered.
( Sources are various and include: Vaclav Havel, English fairy tales, Mary Wollstoncraft, Jane Eyre, Virginia Woolf, The Independent, BBC Radio 4 etc.. The secion entitled 'Sara' was first published in The Coleridge Bulletin, Spring 2002)