Appetites of love - Elizabeth Bartlett

Elizabeth Bartlett's powerfully evocative poems are remarkable for their painfully truthful insights into people's lives. Born in 1924, she worked for many years in the Health Service. For Peter Forbes, she is poetry's chronicler of today's 'damaged Britain' . . . 'She writes about people in extreme states, some of which she has experienced herself . . . ' In her collection, Appetites of Love - drawing on poems written in her 70s - she recalls past loves and times with openness and honesty.

Elizabeth Bartlett (1924-2008) was born in Deal, in the mining region of Kent.
She left school at 15 shortly before the start of the Second World War, to start work in a factory making hypodermic needles. Married during the War, she helped support her family with various jobs, working for 16 years as a medical secretary, and later in the home help service and as a tutor. She lived in Burgess Hill, West Sussex. Despite early success at the age of 19, in Tambimuttu's Poetry London, she did not publish again until her mid-50s. Her first retrospective volume, A Lifetime of Dying: Poems 1942-1979 (Peterloo Poets, 1979), covered mainly work written in the latter two decades. She went on to publish four collections in the 1980s and early 90s: Strange Territory (Peterloo Poets, 1983), The Czar Is Dead (Rivelin Grapheme, 1986), Instead of a Mass (Headland, 1991) and Look, No Face (Redbeck Press, 1991). In 1995 Bloodaxe published Two Women Dancing: New & Selected Poems, edited by Carol Rumens, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This was followed by two later collections of poems written in her late 70s, Appetites of Love (2001) and Mrs Perkins and Oedipus (2004), both from Bloodaxe. In 2005 the Poetry Archive issued her CD, Elizabeth Bartlett Reading from her poems.
Elizabeth Bartlett died in 2008, age 84.