Restricted View

Like craning your neck from a seat in a theatre, looking at the glittering night city from a skyscraper, or watching Woody Allen filming across the street, Restricted View, sees every glimpse of a life as partial, as though the reader has just stumbled on a diary entry still being written, or a lovers' scene, mid-conversation. In the messy chaos and tantalizing beauty of the city from London to Russia, Italy and New York, emotionally charged encounters replay, held in poetry's present tense, or turned over and examined as closely as cheap jewels: the `remembered strings of amber beads/glinting from long passed market stalls.'


The poet picks her way around a tightrope temptation to use poetry like a diary (as she hints in the Writer's Dairy) but the intensity of memories is matched, too, in the empathy found for vividly realised couplings in history, whether it be the child bride of a Medici tyrant in Florence, Mussolini's long suffering mistress, Bernini's angel statues in Rome or the Venetian art collector Peggy Guggenheim.


Always the `view', like the tricksy cover portrait by contemporary artist Natasha Archdale constructed entirely of words, remains `restricted'. If at times, Cole seems far more figuratively naked than in her portrait, the book's epigraph, about Evelyn Waugh's famous gossip columnist Mr Chatterbox (who invented people to write about) hints too at the element of fiction there even in journalist Cole's most seemingly autobiographical writing.


From Grazia to tell-all interviews and autobiographies of politicians and stars, in an age obsessed with candid details, Restricted View maintains the impossibility of knowing anyone's `true' story. The past and the present are improvised and improved, the moment that the poet picks up her pen, or, as in `The Writer', is drawn back to her computer, its stand-by lights blinking in the night, like waiting land across the bay.