Lipstick

I like this. The empty mouths are powerful images, hinting at much more than is said (hungry, voiceless, sexless).

I like the word play and repitition.

Nice work.

You know, the first stanza raised the spectre of the liberation of the concentration camps so powerfully that I couldn't read on at first attempt. It reminded me of a painting I'd forgotten the name of.

I'm glad I came back to this one: one death or many they're all sad, being the end of a life.

Very, very clever and moving.

Despite the poet's obvious skill I thought this was in bad taste. I didn't like Sylvia Plath claiming all the Jewish dead for her nursery rhyme Daddy and I don't like the whiff of the holocaust here, trotted out for its emotional shorthand.

Here the repetition, the writerly references to Daddy, the repulsion of the narrator in the lines 'shit-pit fall'- will not do. The poem feels cerebral, unfelt on some level, and the last line 'and no lipstick comes' too momentous and melodramatic.

I am responding with some hesitancy to the criticism of 'bad taste', and feel reluctant to defend a piece of writing, – which like all writing – must live or die entirely at the behest of the reader and not the author.

The lipstick of this poem is indeed a reference to the lipstick sent into the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945 at the time of its 'liberation'. There is a well-known extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin, DSO:

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it; it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick.... At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last, they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

The reference to the Holocaust in the poem is therefore no 'emotional shorthand' but a reminder- a reminder that our humanity can rest on the smallest of acts.

'Lipstick' was one of several poems written directly from the experience of my mother's life long illness and recent hospitatisation. There is a Plath-like backstory, but it's not a unique one. That is the point about humanity- we share it. When one of us loses our identity, we all do-irrespective of the circumstances.

If 'the poem feels cerebral and unfelt at some level', then it probably is. It’s a defence, a side effect, of watching a dehumanising process eating away at someone you love.

Very good poem and I think there's nothing wrong with using the holocaust as inspiration. Such monumental and emotionally charged events can produce amazing art. Titanic film, Sassoon's poetry, etc. If we had to be careful not to offend anyone when we wrote then writing would be extremely boring. Anything's fair game.