Lad's love - Sylvia Kantaris

Intimate and obsessive poems addressed by a middle-aged woman to her young lover provide the focal point of Sylvia Kantaris's new book. Set in Britain in the years 1987-1990, the course of the relationship reects the social and political tumult of the period, along with the constant threat of instant extinction. The poems reach back to Greek mythology and forward to the possibility of 'an endless future sealed in permafrost' in their anxious attempt to "justify" a love which runs counter to the patriarchal order. Despite moments of hilarity and triumph, there are threatening undertones from the start, and the violent conclusion - linked to the dismantling of the Welfare State and the imposition of Poll Tax - is foredoomed. Tender and moving, often ironic, but ultimately disturbing, the sequence of vivid cameos, set "on location", has the episodic quality of a diary with missing pages, but works on many levels to unravel the conditioning of the human couple who become helpless victims of forces beyond their control.