Aquarium

Chapter 36: Town Typing Office

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About This Book

A sequence of vivid lyric poems juxtaposes urban modernity and sensual escapism, shifting between images of aquaria, industrial streets, cathedrals, cabarets and cultivated gardens. Rich sensory detail and decadent diction evoke crowded factories, neon-lit cafés, and intimate interiors while poems alternate social satire, melancholic reverie and pastoral relief. Several pieces use theatrical vignettes and musical rhythms to render characters and scenes indirectly, while others address sacred space, memory and longing through ornate imagery. The book’s structure groups shorter, imagistic poems into two parts that balance urban manners with curving, often erotic or elegiac, meditations.

Town Typing Office

HERE in an office of sickly greens

Typists tap fast on black machines;

Middle-aged drudges the hour-long day

Hammer their finger-nails away:

I have just come from the country’s crown,

Shropshire, you know, with clouds of down,

This is a change from the gaping sheep

Grazing for ever, half asleep.

I have just come from the country wealds,

Shropshire, you know, with spinach fields,

Men there are honest and plump and red,

Here they are sallow for lack of bread.

But in the office the clock ticks fast

Telling how soon the hours flit past,

Middle-aged drudges the hour-long day

Hammer their pallid lives away.