Cocktail List

‘Martinis are the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet’ - HL Mencken

Since I last wrote here, my pamphlet Cocktail List came out with Blown Rose, illustrated by Zoë Taylor - all their new handbooks were launched at a very chic little party. For those who missed out on this very limited edition, the poems will also be in my new collection Lives of the Female Poets, coming out in September with Bloodaxe. I’ve always felt that being offered a cocktail at someone’s house is the height of sophistication, but never invested money into my drinks cabinet until lockdown. For a while, ordering a bottle of Chartreuse, Amaro or Mescal with the money I would have spent going out on Friday night, then working out what new concoctions I could make with it, became the highlight of the week. I very much recommend Richard Godwin’s The Spirits, both the substack and the book, which were my initial guides - in the index of my sticky copy of The Spirits I have ticked off all the ones I’ve tried, and written in the names of additional experiments (some of my own invention), and I am pleased (ashamed) to say I’ve ticked off 165. Here’s a glimpse:

I have just come back from Italy with a bottle of Cynar, so will be playing around with that this weekend too and adding more ticks.

Cocktail List is a kind of portrait of the artist in cocktails, that begins in a bar called Bergeracs in Bolton when I was sixteen. It was a grubby little basement with soft-porn on screens, and cocktails came in plastic cups with grotesque names like Slippery Nipple or Blow Job. My drink of choice was a Red Witch, made with lager, Diamond White, pernod and creme de cassis. I think the idea was if you could afford one, you’d then be drunk enough to ask men to buy you the rest of the evenings’ drinks.

Hopefully my tastes have got more sophisticated since then, but there are many cocktails that similarly conjure up strong memories. In my poem ‘Last Word’ I write:

A cocktail is a ritual 
to make a minute immortal.
It ought to be precise and memorable.

In this way, I think a good cocktail and a poem have something in common - both are concerned with simultaneously catching and creating a moment. And like poems, cocktails can be an intense experience, able to bring you to laughter, tears or epiphany at great speed. Cocktails require form and rules: the balancing equal parts; ratioing sweet to sour. They can be complex, adult flavours. And they require titles! I have so far invented the Quarantini, the Premonition, the Frog Prince, the Sheela-na-gig and the Posy…

Anyway, here is a cocktail poem from me that was previously published in bath magg. When I think poetry and cocktails, I’m always reminded of Plath and Sexton having three-martini afternoons at The Ritz after poetry workshops with Robert Lowell - how that seems to me, still, the most glamorous thing of all time, and yet I know they were also talking of death, and that the glamour of alcohol can also be the glamour of self-destruction. In this poem I imagine I get to drink martinis with them (and yes, Sexton did apparently get her daughters to mix her martinis!).

In case you’re wondering I like mine dirty.

Three-Martini Afternoon


The first in a glass 
like a tornado
brought to heel.

How the olive
with its red heart
makes a Dead Sea.

Children can be trained 
to mix martinis 
to deliver to your study

if you wish.
I eat the free potato chips.
Order another looking-glass,

sip its frigid rim,
my piss-hole in the snow. 
It’s ritzy at The Ritz 

plus, basically, just vodka neat -
a blowtorch at white heat
is quite the taste! 

Clear spirit
as in fugue; electroshock.
A good martini’s always

haunted by vermouth’s
bone-dry and colourless
monoxide.

The others? 
Oh, they caught their ride,
but stir one more.

I’ve got this thirst this thirst.
 

Other things

-I won the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize for The Modern Fairies! And was shortlisted for the RSL Encore Prize (for a second novel) too. Very sadly for me, the parties were on the same evening so I had to miss the latter, but very honoured all the same and there were beetroot martinis at the Tadeusz Bradecki awards so I think I made the right call.

-I had an absolutely wonderful time in Italy with my family at half-term, drinking innumerable spritzes, riding on a gondola, looking at art in the Uffizi and seeing fireflies. I’ve been reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and working on a project about the Italian painter Lavinia Fontana that I’m hoping to share with you soon…

-I’ve been doing more prose events than poetry - I read at Word Play in Birmingham and the Essex Book Festival this week - but it was lovely to attend the launch party of my friend Erica Hesketh, whose stunning debut In the Lily Room is very much worth your time. She even had origami lilies! An autumn of poetry is coming up though (and we’re about to announce the lineup of the Winchester Poetry Festival so watch this space)

-Apologies for not doing a readalong for a while - I’ve been teaching an online course which has used up the same bit of my brain. I’ve also been changing my mind a lot - I was going to do The Waste Land but then decided it was too big a commitment. I then decided to do a sonnet sequence, and was choosing between Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets, two of my all-time favourites. HOWEVER, given I am about to release a book called Lives of the Female Poets I’ve now swerved again, and finally settled on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Starts next week.