In Winding / Unwinding Denni Turp takes the colloquial British cliché “As the actress said to the bishop” and strips away the comic veneer from this classed linguistic commonplace to vividly embody its central
character.
The “actress” of British imagination has been a figure for a variety of different—though equally unflattering—classed and gendered assumptions. As with many staples of comic language, it’s not often we interrogate what is bubbling just beneath the surface; the unconscious attitudes and biases our clichés serve to conceal and (occasionally) to betray. Yet Winding / Unwinding sets about just such interrogative work with real imaginative gusto, and Turp’s Actress emerges as equally savvy and tender; ever ready to meet the world with a lively and compassionate intelligence.
These qualities are also the signal features of Turp’s writing: both subversively feminist and stoically clear-sighted about the state of the world, and the likely fortunes of working-class women within it. The poems brim and fizz with a restless and resistive energy; even at their most forlorn, they are in touch with life in all the ways that count—with humour, with kindness, and with keen, unclouded vision.
Winding / Unwinding by Denni Turp, with an Introduction by Fran Lock, 20pps., £8, is available here as hard copy and here as an ebook.
