We had a good rummage through the wardrobe. Jenny Joseph in her splendid ‘Warning’ looks forward to rocking some striking new outfits, as does the ‘Dedicated follower of fashion’ in Ray Davies’ classic song lyric.
No-one seems to take trousers seriously. Roger McGough wore ‘Macca’s trousers’ to a disco and Benjamin Zepheniah put his on back to front (‘Wot a pair’). Maria Jastrzebska reveals ‘Which of us wears the trousers’. In ‘What’s the use?’ Ogden Nash is not impressed by a lady’s choice of (US) pants.
And in ‘The golden shrug’, AE Stallings is not impressed by the British Museum’s over-exposition of its exhibit. A poem featuring many clever rhymes.
WB Yeats made his poems ‘A coat’, while his sometime friend Ezra Pound made ‘The cloak’ out of classical Greek epigrams.
Someone in Annemarie Austin’s ‘Clothing’ seems to be hiding their real self inside in layers of disguise. Gillian Clark in ‘Shawl’ wraps herself in Welsh farming landscapes.
Toshio Nakae’s ‘A kimono’ is put on with ritualistic care, while Billy Collins imagines ‘Taking off Emily Dickinson’s clothes’, without revealing all.
‘The skunk’ (Seamus Heaney) and ‘Warming her pearls’ (Carol Ann Duffy) engender erotic longings in the poems’ speakers. The latter poet’s ‘Tiresias’ creates a challenge for his wife when he comes home as a woman. And in her poem ‘Havisham’ the jilted bride imagines taking sadistic revenge.
In Ken Gambles’ ‘One for the album’ a curious cat gets into the christening photos. Connie Bensley’s ‘Bloomsbury snapshot’ doesn’t say what they’re wearing, but we can picture it.
A succession of women in bathing suits on a ‘Beach in August’ leads Weldon Kees to thoughts of mortality, in an unusual structure (stanzas of 5, 6 and 7 lines) and rhyme scheme.
‘My love in her attire does show her wit’ but is jolly fine out of it, in this neat anonymous poem.
Tony Harrison’s ‘Jumper’ is not quite the knitwear he was expecting for Christmas. Wendy Cope’s ‘Legacy’ is of many knitted woolly socks. Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to my socks’ is full of splendid comedy and fantasy.
J A Lindon’s ‘Not so gorgeous’ catalogues all sorts of knickers.
In ‘April’ (a fine parody of Masefield’s ‘Sea fever’) GF Bradby can’t get warm. Maybe he should try the ‘Galoshes’ that Paul Jennings so riotously advocates.
‘There is a willow…’ from Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells of Ophelia dragged to her watery grave by her clothes.
‘The yeoman’ from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales wears the green costume of a ‘forster’, happily recalling our group’s previous leader.