Irish-born Pratibha Castle, who currently resides in Sussex, holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Chichester. A former singer, artist and holistic therapy workshop facilitator, Castle has been highly commended, shortlisted and longlisted in a number of competitions for her poetry. Her first book, A Triptych of Birds & A Few Loose Feathers, was joint winner in a 2019 Hedgehog Poetry Press competition.  

In the present volume, published in 2023, Castle’s ‘waste land’ differs in many respects from that portrayed by Eliot. Parts of both are set in London and both explore other waste lands, but that is where the similarities end. The fact that some of the students in the title poem are reading The Waste Land is incidental and the connection that one may be tempted to make is, at best, somewhat tenuous.

The 16 poems in this pamphlet range from Notting Hill and Holland Park to Goa and a certain Mahatma Gandhi Road, one of many such roads that exist by that name in India. It covers life in bedsitter land, a time of growing up in the swinging sixties, when miniskirts from Biba were “two fingers below peril level” and everyone was listening to Radio Caroline. Castle’s soundtrack is full of “white noise”, colourful, trendy clothing, late-night cinema screenings, Portobello market teeming with punters and “costermongers / batting shouts like Epsom bookies”. The sights and sounds of the streets are portrayed vividly in a kind of claustrophobic time capsule. 

Her style is compact. The descriptions, written as if in response to a series of snapshots, are fast and furious so that a lot of information is conveyed in the space of a single stanza. Here, by way of example, is the opening to ‘My Saviour’:

 

     Notting Hill, a bed-sit state

     she’d fled to from the sticks

     on leaving school. CND signs

     scrawled on walls, graffiti

     bleeding like the Jesus hearts

     in all the convents she’d attended.

     Long hair, bleary eyes, soul bro’

     to the hippies in their purple flares, jellabas,

     mumbling wanna score?

 

Crucially, in that same poem we catch a glimpse of what is happening in the wider world. There are references, for example, to Vietnam, “tales of paddy fields” from returning soldiers, “mortar brash as fireworks” and “Nam nightmares”.

The search for self-knowledge and love is followed by a series of poems that cover pregnancy, childbirth and “the queendom” of motherhood. A moment of tenderness in ‘St. Jude of the Lost Cause’ announces the birth of a baby boy:

 

     Almost teatime at the hospital,

     midwife Mary chirrups

     it’s a boy and you 

     are resting on my belly,

     your blue gaze unblinking

     as though taking stock,

     searing me to the core   …

 

‘Down Mahatma Gandhi Road’ takes the reader to the squalor of an escaped-to India where Castle once again offers up vignettes of daily life where loneliness, even after “this lemming flight” continues to haunt the narrator:

 

     Scurvy dogs 

     and goats

     nose the limp corpses

     of banana skins, orange rind.

     Spices. Flesh. Drenching

     jasmine breath. You,

     amidst this pauper glut,

     still lonely.

 

Castle’s short lines and vivid images conjure up pictures from the emerging counter-culture of London after the second world war, reminding us all of our vulnerability and of how easy it is to feel lonely in a crowd.

 

Pratibha Castle, Miniskirts in The Waste Land, Hedgehog Poetry Press, £8.99