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    Hooked
    Hooked
    Hooked
    Ebook79 pages33 minutes

    Hooked

    By Carolyn Smart

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    About this ebook

    Longlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award

    Hooked is a stunning new collection of seven poems about seven famous or infamous women: Myra Hindley, Unity Mitford, Zelda Fitzgerald, Dora Carrington, Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles, and Elizabeth Smart. Each of these women was hooked on, and her life contorted by, an addiction or obsession. Here we have seven variations on the insoluble conundrum of sexuality – each in a remarkably distinct, authentic voice.


    Carolyn Smart brilliantly recreates seven lives of great colour. These women, all born before the end of World War II, struggle to find – or escape – their roles in a society hostile to female intelligence and ambition. Here are the agonies of the half-lived life; talents and voices that are lost or go astray in seven different ways, at a time before the greater freedoms that Feminism brought to the Western World. Whether these women have artistic success or not they are, in these astonishing poems, devastatingly articulate about their difficult lives.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2009
    ISBN9781894078894
    Hooked
    Author

    Carolyn Smart

    Carolyn Smart has written six previous collections of poetry, including The Way to Come Home (Brick Books, 1993), and Hooked: Seven Poems (Brick Books, 2009). Her memoir At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press, 2001) won first prize in the 1993 CBC Literary Contest. Smart is the founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers and an editor for the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press; since 1989 she has taught Creative Writing at Queen’s University. She lives with her family in the country north of Kingston.

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      Book preview

      Hooked - Carolyn Smart

      Biography

      Written on the Flesh

      Myra Hindley: July 23, 1942–November 15, 2002

      Mass murder is a novel written on the flesh

      — Ian Brady: 1938–

      I

      this is what it was:

      Ian’s hands

      he could make me laugh

      and what else?

      that first night he took me to the pictures:

      all those people at Nuremberg, cheering,

      better than a football match

      his nails were clean

      and he read books

      we met at Christmastime,

      an office party at Millwards

      II

      as a girl I

      used to write a lot of stories

      laughed and sang

      made up jokes

      was bad at needlework

      couldn’t bear domestic science

      loved the mouth organ

      played it for Maureen

      mums liked me

      I was a good babysitter

      was a Catholic, took communion

      after that boy drowned I cried

      and prayed and prayed

      God is a disease, a plague, a weight round a man’s neck

      said de Sade

      oh, God, yes

      said David, who was there,

      while his wife Maureen sat home with Mum

      what’s all the noise about

      Gran asked

      it’s just the dogs I said

      III

      the books we read:

      The Pleasures of the Torture Chamber

      Kiss of the Whip

      Heinrich Himmler

      The Anti-Sex

      De Sade

      on the weekends we’d picnic

      take the dog

      take the pictures

      Ian would write it up

      Cradle of Erotica

      Sexual Anomalies and Perversions

      The Mark of the Swastika

      we studied German

      Ian looks a bit like Goebbels,

      people said that

      didn’t know you could buy those kinds of books

      saw them down the shops in Manchester

      could walk right in

      and there they’d be, so easy

      IV

      I was good, worked hard

      shorthand, typing

      dressed well, pulling up my stockings

      with my long white hands

      see this one

      taken in the garden?

      I like the black and whites

      made my hair peroxide blonde

      only proper, like Irma Grese

      I’d look at her picture and think about her

      schnell, she said, hurry, laughing at her hangman,

      at Bergen-Belsen she’d stand there

      in her hard boots, cellophane whip

      she ate up every minute of it

      the sound her dogs made when she let them at it

      I can see that in her face

      pure joy

      V

      we talked so much

      we made it happen:

      Pauline

      was July

      she was 16

      I was 21

      Ian and I lived with Gran

      we’d go to work come home have tea

      listen to the tapes

      see this one of me with the dog?

      I’m looking down at John 12 dead and buried underground

      then Keith 12

      then Lesley Anne 10

      no I didn’t have anything to do with it

      I stood at the window

      and he killed her

      though he said I did it

      with my bare hands

      her screaming in her socks and shoes

      Please, Mummy, please!

      we played Ray Conniff’s Little Drummer Boy

      it made the jury weep

      to hear it

      (Ian was busy with the mints)

      wherever he has been, I have been too

      VI

      at my funeral I want Mum, my nephew,

      and I want David

      he’s seen things

      stood in the sitting room

      and thought Ian danced with a rag doll

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