Miniskirts in the Waste Land

Miniskirts in The Waste Land, set in Notting Hill and India, is an elegy for the late 60s/early 70s. In flamboyant contrast to the drab reality of post WW2 Britain, the air in these years of emerging counterculture, the era of the pill, throbbed with the scents and sounds of youth, the blazing hues of psychedelia. These poems portray a young woman’s search for self-knowledge, and love. But the heady freedom of the sexual revolution masks a darker side: a fear of loneliness, the realities of the Vietnam war. Along the way, she discovers the joys and disappointments of young love, explores the ’queendom’ of motherhood, has a taste of her inner power till, in the end, the ’jangled’ voices from her past ’fade’ along with ’voices of the jungle’. Peace, however transient, descends upon her.Miniskirts in The Waste Land offers, for the curious, a glimpse into this vanished world. And for those who were there, the tantalising ghost of Patchouli scent and incense.'Pratibha Castle’s Waste Land, like that other, read in English class by the pamphlet’s convent school-educated speaker, is a multi-faceted landscape of people and place, snapshots of brief connections, lives held taut by fear and loneliness. From the wide-eyed, ’skank of damp’ bedsit realities of a young woman adrift in late ’60s/early ’70s London, to the squalor of an escaped-to India, Castle uses vivid, unforgettable sensory imagery to release from the page a psychedelic blast of protest, betrayal, 'Nam nightmares’, fleeting intimacy, loss. Her eye for key details is pin-sharp: in London, unwelcoming women with ’pecking gossip’ have ’Princess Margaret scarves / knotted tight as knuckles’; in India, with its rats and ’roaches, beggars’ wrists are ’a bangle-clash of need’. But Castle luminously relieves the tense and the tawdry with her deft depiction of tender moments: where lovers ’licked sugar trickles / off each other’s chins’, and, in Leaven, an exquisite hymn to pregnancy, a woman ’Coaxes loaves / out of their tins / as if from cradles’. This is language, poetry, to reach out and touch, taste, savour.'Dawn Gorman'Here is a vivid and sensual poetry of short lines and sharp images that carry the fortunate reader all the way from Portobello Market to Mahatma Gandhi Road in India - ’the air a ferment// of patchouli, rotten apples’. These poems are vividly-drawn snapshots of a time, and mind, and place - and I am very much drawn in.'Jean Atkin