Event
9th October
Evening, Big Day of Poetry at Cramphorn Theatre.

Bio
Annie Freud was born in London in 1948 and studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. A pamphlet, A Voids Officer Achieves the Tree Pose (Donut Press 2006), was followed by her first full collection from Picador, The Best Man That Ever Was (2007) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and received the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award. She has taught the Advanced Poetry Writing Course at City University and teaches workshops and courses for Poetry School. Since 1975 she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, exhibiting work and undertaking commissions. Her second collection The Mirabelles (Picador) will be published in October 2010.

Poem

A Canaletto Orange

He remembers how she pulled him down with her laugh,
lips ghoulish with wine, kingfisher glitter on her eyelids.
'Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens' was playing
and when she tap-danced to it, the crowd stood agog
at such velleity and he was like a man in a blizzard.
Twenty years on, the kids grown up, the marriage gone,
it's late lunch at La Baracola with loquacious Marianne
(these days, he deploys women's names like well-bred swear-words
or types of land-mass phenomena or famous makes of cars).
Her legs are stunning, but that's not really the point,
he reasons in the final seconds of his self-possession.
As he drags their Gewurztraminer from its silver bucket,
there she is, framed in an alcove, lips blocked in Canaletto orange,
one heel cocked for combat. Christ, she's keener than I thought!
he wheezes, as she coils herself into her throne of cane.