#hydromaniac

Ha, this account is dead.

A poem that first appeared in 1967 explores the thirst of desire, necessary as wine, water and gin-fizz.

Rosemary Tonks’s two collections of poetry excited many young English readers in the 1960s. So sassy, fresh, sexy and French, we thought—and wanted more. But there were to be no more poems after the publication of Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967), the collection in which this week’s poem, "Hydromaniac," first appeared. Tonks, more prolific as fiction-writer than poet, published the last of her six novels in 1972. Then, in the spirit of her admired Rimbaud, though for different reasons, she stopped writing. Neil Astley, who has recently edited the two poetry collections for Bloodaxe under the title Bedouin of the London Evening: Collected Poems fills in the biography in fascinating detail here. Tonks’s poetry seems influenced both by the symbolists and the situationists, and sometimes feels like an erotic extension of the dérive, in which sex is an aspect of urban geography. "Hydromaniac" is one of the rare poems that finds rest. In the beginning, the speaker marks the loved body as if she were a “marble-smith”. The body gains solidity from an image that also suggests Michelangelo, planning to release the angel from the block of marble. Subsequently, the body resembles “the pleasure page in a daily newspaper”. The stroking fingers, we’re reminded, are those of a writer and reader, a hungry consumer as well as a thirsty lover.

"Hydromaniac" has roots in an everyday metaphor. Desire is thirst; its satisfaction is blissful, necessary refreshment. Tonks’s figurative language flows with a demotic ease, mixing the colloquial and the metaphorical so they form a single register. “I sniffed you to quench my thirst” is plain enough, while effecting a synaesthesia continued in the transferred epithet of the “soaking wet chords”. The adjectives in the phrase “huge, damp sheets of lightning” inevitably suggest bed linen, luxuriantly king-sized and moist with body fluids, as well as the sheet-lightning before the storm. Metamorphosis continues: the “overflow” of the music “could float a canoe”. “Tear” in line 8 is a verb, but “tear cold” also looks like a compound adjective minus hyphen. Somehow this cleverness is entirely unfussy.

In line 14, a particular masterstroke brings back four of the earlier key words and exultantly lines them up—“… newsprint, lightning, music, skin!” Like the insistent words “skin” and “refreshing” earlier, “haughty” twice sets the tone, evoking a lofty bathroom (more marble, perhaps?) and erotic pride. The beloved is gently teased, a king swimming like a new baby in “his water-colour coat of soap”.

There’s wine in the poem as well as water, hinting a miracle, and then, of course, there’s the strictly non-biblical gin fizz. I’m afraid that the mixture of drinks may have numbed my brain, though, because, as much as I’d like to explain line 12, I can’t. The pairing of the “glass joint” and “rod of grass” may signal marijuana, but how? Did the joint become transparent after being dropped in the bath-tub? Or is the gin-fizz simply gin-fizz, drunk, perhaps through a jointed green glass straw? The line is careful, almost studied, and, despite its obscurity, adds deliciously to the poem’s texture and memorability, before the final quatrain reveals a scene as domestic and tender as it is refreshingly unexpected.

Hydromaniac

I was leaning across your chest; Like a marble-smith, I made pencilmarks over Its vanilla skin, its young man’s skin, Refreshing as the pleasure page in a daily newspaper. I sniffed you to quench my thirst, As one sniffs in the sky huge, damp sheets of lightning That bring down the chablis, hocks, moselles, And tear cold watery holes. Those soaking wet chords from Brahms ( … their overflow, On which you could float a canoe) Are not more refreshing! Nor is the fragrant gin-fizz From the glass joint of a rod of grass.

My life cries out for water! Haughty sheets of newsprint, lightning, music, skin! Haughty bathrooms where the lukewarm swimmer In his water-colour coat of soap is king.