I Want! I Want!

"Ageing, but really the ages of women. It has a section on girlhood, a section on middle age, and one on older age. There’s a wonderful sense in which the children and the grandmothers are remarkably alike, and both causing trouble, and wanting to say ‘I want!’ That title is very indicative of the determination to discuss ambition and desire in this book. It’s fighting against the English habit of telling girls to pipe down, you know: they should be seen and not heard. Many older women aren’t heard much in public either. She’s thinking about older people who are absolutely at the height of their creative powers and who are full of life still. She’s a lyric poet, who makes pared down little bundles that spring open at you. She does a boxer’s punch at the end of her poems, often, when you don’t expect it. All the way through it’s a punch back against politeness. It’s fierce and hungry. It takes domestic imagery—the flowerbed, the lawn mower—but the lawn mower in this book is likely to be accelerating and chewing up all the flowers, a metaphor for the hungry woman accelerating wildly through life. The subject matter is just so ordinary and delightful. It’s splashing and tickling and making hot water bottles, and she’s so very sharp and fierce with precisely those materials. And there’s an underlying affiliation with William Blake—she’s thinking a lot about his Songs of Innocence and Experience . She uses his image of the ladder put up to the moon. So there’s a kind of cosmic force field that comes from Blake and occupies her domestic work. There’s another poem I really recommend called ‘The Recital’ where the child must perform brilliantly on the piano at the appropriate moment. It shows us in ten short lines what we consider to be ‘appropriate’ ambition: a mother urgently wanting her child to show promise. To say ‘I want to be a poet’ is ridiculous. But you must also excel when asked to play the piano in the middle of the night. It’s very wry about the contradictions and expectations of ambition."