MAKING A ROUX
Poems by Eizabeth Bewick

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Elizabeth Bewick was born in County Durham but has lived in Winchester for almost forty years. She came to Hampshire in 1961 to set up the School Library Service and, now retired, lives in a three hundred-year-old cottage in Hyde, an area which features in several of her poems.

She is active in poetry circles in Winchester, belonging to Wykeham Poets and the Winchester Workshop, and for many years she ran Poetry Readings in the Deanery under the auspices of the Winchester Cathedral Players. In 1994 she received the ‘Southampton City Writers’ annual award for her contributions to poetry.

She has been writing poetry all her life but only seriously considered publication in retirement. Her first book, Comfort Me With Apples, was published in limited edition in 1987, illustrated with wood-engravings by the publisher, Graham Williams, at the Florin Press. Heartease, her first full collection, was published by Peterloo Poets in 1991.

Jeremy Hooker, in a review written for The Green Book, says ‘The poems in Heartease appeal strongly to the senses; they are colourful, painterly, appealing to the eye, and they evoke fragrances, are sharp in flavour, and have a sensitive touch.’

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Too Many Levels

I didn’t have my ears pierced
till I was seventy-five, and
now my friends are nagging me
to paint my toe-nails.
Why should I listen to them?
I don’t like painted nails, and
anyway I’ve got a hammer toe
that nearly kept me out of the Navy.

She doesn’t ever get bored,
my neighbour, and there she sits
stark naked at the piano
for hours on end, always practising.
Why can’t I be like her,
not bother about what people think? -
living has too many levels
and I’ve always felt the cold.

I’m getting there gradually,
polished my shoes on the table
last week, my mother must have turned
in her grave, except that we had her
cremated – it was what she wanted.
I could have been on the films
but I played too hard to get
and priced myself out of the market.

The world of computer speak
attracts and repels me by turns.
I too could live like that,
send letters by fax and e-mail,
walk around with mobile ‘phone,
have a chipset motherboard.
I could make love on the internet
or would that be too theoretical?

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MAKING A ROUX
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: by Kate Dicker
Publication: AUTUMN 2000 (74 pages laminated paperback)