Rosemary Tonks

"Thinking we were safe-insanity! We went in to make love. All the same Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom. Then in the gloom... ...And who does not know that pair of shutters With all the awkward hook on them All screeching whispers?"

"— All this sitting about in cafés to calm down Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature! The idiotic cut of the stanzas; the novels, full up, gross. I have lived it, and I know too much. My café nerves are breaking me With black, exhausting information."

"Disappeared! What happened? Because I admire her poems, I've been trying to find out for years … according to some people she became a Sufi. Others say she entered a closed order. Others imagine her footloose and anonymous, travelling the wide world. In any event, no trace of her seems to survive - apart from the writing she left behind."

"Andrew Motion, published in The Times, 30 October, 2004"