Patricia Beer

Patricia Beer Poems

Patricia Beer Biography

Patricia Beer (4 November 1919 – 15 August 1999) was an English poet and critic. She was born in Exmouth, Devon into a family of Plymouth Brethren. She moved away from her religious background as a young adult, becoming a teacher and academic. She began to write poetry after World War II, while living in Italy; she is most often classified as a 'New Romantic' poet comparable to John Heath-Stubbs. On her own account, however, there is a discontinuity in her work. Devon is a major presence. She was married twice; first to the writer P.N. Furbank, and then to Damien Parsons, an architect, settling in Upottery, near Honiton, England. From the later 1960s she wrote full-time. She edited several significant anthologies, broadcast, and contributed to literary reviews.)

The Best Poem Of Patricia Beer

The Lost Woman

My mother went with no more warning
than a bright voice and a bad pain.
Home from school on a June morning
And where the brook goes under the lane
I saw the back of a shocking white
Ambulance drawing away from the gate.

She never returned and I never saw
Her buried. So a romance began.
The ivy-mother turned into a tree
That still hops away like a rainbow down
The avenue as I approach.
My tendrils are the ones that clutch.

I made a life for her over the years.
Frustrated no more by a dull marriage
She ran a canteen through several wars.
The wit of a cliché-ridden village
She met her match at an extra-mural
Class and the OU summer school.

Many a hero in his time
And every poet has acquired
A lost woman to haunt the home,
To be compensated and desired,
Who will not alter, who will not grow,
A corpse they need never get to know.

She is nearly always benign. Her habit
Is not to stride at dead of night.
Soft and crepuscular in rabbit-
Light she comes out. Hear how they hate
Themselves for losing her as they did.
Her country is bland and she does not chide.

But my lost woman evermore snaps
From somewhere else: ‘You did not love me.
I sacrificed too much perhaps,
I showed you the way to rise above me
And you took it. You are the ghost
With the bat-voice, my dear. I am not lost.'

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