The Function of Tears

Limited first edition. 8vo. [8]pp., n.d. [1979?]. Stapled, lime green card covers. No. 36 of an edition of 150 copies printed on Abbey Mills laid paper, the first 50 of which are signed by the poet.

Signed by Author to the colophon page.

Poem. "I try to keep the words of a poem close to the feelings and sensations that inspired it, in the hope that it will inspire the same sense of recognition, feelings and memories in its reader."

Intense self-scrutiny is the hallmark of Ruth Fainlight's poetry, a transplanted New Yorker of East European Jewish heritage, and widow of Alan Sillitoe. By focussing on life's seeming minutiae, her work mines a quasi-religious sense of the numinous, even the mystical, within the everyday. A friend of Sylvia Plath's in the late 1950s, the tragic poet dedicated her 1962 poem 'Elm' to her. Recipient of the 1997 Whitbread Poetry Award.