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The Glutton’s Daughter by Sinead Wilson
(Donut Press, £5) 24pp.
Available from www.donutpress.co.uk


Where Annie Freud’s introduction comes from Hugo Williams, Sinead Wilson’s is penned by John Stammers, and that recommendation gives a fair idea of where the poems of The Glutton’s Daughter fit into the contemporary scheme of things. A blend of highbrow allusions and nostalgic pop cultural references (‘Memories Of Berwick Street And Dyfrig’ culminates on the old chestnut of a confusion between Shakespeare’s Portia and a certain brand of luxury sports car, for example) produces poems such as ‘Le Film Noir’, with its Hollywood gangster argot (“I’m no patsy, I know these dames are dolls,/ fickle as smoke that seeps from lips”) or the punning conclusion of ‘And Two’, in which the elderly “only couple in a restaurant” remember Fred Astaire, practice their footwork, and “Down the descending scale of years…disclose how her voice/ tightened your pubescent grip/ and pulled you, groin-first, closer/ to your partner’s stiff propriety”. There are more puns when ‘The Tycoon’s Wife’ considers her “antique jardinières/ the chandeliers, the chaise-longues…all this stolid, cold wealth”, and slightly tweaks the sound of the earlier ‘weight in gold’ to expose a spiritual vacuum, while ‘Curios’ plays an inter-textual game with Paul Muldoon, claiming to find “Brownlee’s leaving note” on the back of a betting slip, evidently explaining the enigma at the heart of one of the Irish trickster’s best-known poems, though not to us. Wilson’s is not the ‘unusual imagination’ praised by Stammers, but she is a highly accomplished exponent of Stammers’ own, post-Muldoon strand of British poetry.