The peepshow girl - Marion Lomax

The Peepshow Girl was Robyn Bolam's first collection, published under her former married name of Marion Lomax. It included 'The Forked Tree', winner of the Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition. Most of the poems from the collection were later republished in Robyn Bolam's New Wings: Poems 1977-2007 (2007).

Marion Lomax is the former married name of Robyn Bolam.

A compelling and accomplished dbut…This book immediately establishes Marion Lomax as a poet of unusual talent.
TLS - Bernard O'Donoghue

There are passionate emotions in these poems, sometimes guarded and obliquely expressed. But Marion Lomax has access to a wide range of voices: Eurydice, Guinevere, Mrs Mackie with her Geordie dialect, and an unnamed woman in a labour camp - as well as her own. She writes vivid natural description, as in "Pheasants" ("In green balaclava and red face mask / Her mate invaded through a hole in the hedge./ Rain glistened on his copper, black-ribbed back"), and freer, more mysterious poems which convey an authentic otherworldly chill. In "The Forked Tree", she uses a firm grid of syllabics to create character and narrative, and an inspired closing image of wild deer: "Jumping in and out in the moonlight, through the forked tree".
Ruth Fainlight

Neither old-fashioned nor new-fangled, but abiding and spiritual.
Observer - Peter Porter