12 results for "Poetry"

Warning: when I am an old woman I shall wear purple

Joseph, Jenny
Voted Britain's favourite poem in 1996, 'Warning', written in 1961, is known and loved the world over. Its declaration of defiance, so vividly and cleverly expressed, appeals to the rebel in all of us as we secretly yearn to throw off the shackles of propriety and enjoy the gleeful freedom of cocking a snook at the rest of the world. In the poem's respectable middle-aged woman, as she indulges in her fantasy of the gabby old crone with her outrageous clothes and dotty behaviour, Jenny Joseph has created a character whose thoughts have been quoted at conferences and funerals, used to cheer up sick friends, remembered with pleasure by children and adults alike. Found in schoolbooks from Alaska to Singapore, the poem has been stitched, stamped, quilted, set to music, printed on cards, written on cakes and made into films. Now, for the first time, 'Warning' appears as an illustrated book with drawings by Pythia Ashton-Jewell specially designed to suit its unique character.
Souvenir Press 2021-11-18 32 pages

Persephone

Joseph, Jenny
Persephone loses her innocence in the Underworld, but finds herself. She is Everywoman coming through darkness, betrayal and disillusion to discover a new life, a new sense of herself. And she is many women in Jenny Joseph's extraordinary novel, which retells the Greek myth of spring and winter, of good and evil.Demeter the earth goddess is every worried mother struggling to understand her daughter. Hades is the reckless man, brutal, possessive, but mellowed by the girl he takes for himself, the woman who goes back to him.In Persephone, Jenny Joseph has created a new kind of novel, a story made up of many stories, our stories, using poetry, narrative, parody and many other kinds of writing. Like the myth itself, Persephone is unforgettable. The book won her the 1986 James Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.
Bloodaxe Books 1986 294 pages

Led by the nose: a garden of smells

Joseph, Jenny
Jenny Joseph was no ordinary poet - and Led by the Nose is no ordinary memoir. Shaped around the smells of the English countryside, it is full of the wilful personality and the sly humour that characterised the purple-clad old woman in her iconic poem 'Warning'. Joseph's eccentricities permeate each chapter as she flows through the gardening year with its chores and blossoms, frequently leading the reader off the garden path to stop, smell the roses, and ignore the world for a while. Full of the sensual awareness of Jenny Joseph's poetry, Led by the Nose is a singular memoir: a work of delicious diversion and literary flair, horticultural anxieties and countercultural tendencies, providing a glimpse - or sniff - of the landscape of this treasured poet's life.
Souvenir Press 2023 208 pages

Nothing like love

Joseph, Jenny
Jenny Joseph is known mainly as the author of Warning, her internationally renowned dramatic monologue in which a middle-aged character talks of her fantasies of old age. But when Jenny was first published in the 1950s she was most admired for the wit of her precision with words in service to a memorable lyric style. Over the more than 60 years in which she has been exploring a wide range of literary forms, new ways of telling stories in prose and verse, introducing cadences of common speech into the lyrical movement of her verse, creating characters who tell their own stories, she has always written what she thinks if as songs . For this new book she has brought back some of those best-loved early love poems to make an entirely fresh combination with previously uncollected poems, and some very new poems published here for the first time. This new collection shows that Jenny Joseph s ability to convey the experiences of a thinking heart is in no way diminished."
Enitharmon 2009 48 pages