Two Women Dancing

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...'

She fills her poems with ordinary, awkward lives and voices, fleshing out her casebook with a deftness that is only apparently offhand, unshockable. The emotional payload is in fact often dizzying., A kind of weird cross between Anne Sexton and Philip Larkin, Bartlett has more to say about a pitiful Britain over the last 40 years than almost any other poet I can think of., Vulnerably human, there is no distinction between the professional and the personal where her response to others' pain is concerned... She is a remorseless truth-teller... Hers is the daybook of a night-nurse of the soul., Truthful, powerful and unexaggerated. The deprivations of childhood become the deprivations of adulthood and then the disappointments and loneliness of middle age. But Ms Bartlett is captain of her own soul… heartening and liberating.

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.