Thus, of Mrs Thatcher, A daughter of Imperial Rome, neither plebeian nor patrician, able to thrust and shear to the bone, a Boadicea turned female centurion who was curiously desperate to rule the waves with England reduced to pit-managers and slaves. It is a play in little, where identity is first made up and then melted. That touching-in of the gladius, 'able to thrust and shear to the bone', is Hibberd all over, as is the bitter diminuendo of the conclusion. Sometimes it is the obdurate perversity of the inspected individual which holds attention, sometimes his or her instability. Hibberd demonstrated long ago that, for him, language is less an instrument than an element, and his poems are among other things ways of letting the language be elemental.
Death is after all getting a fair crack of the whip here, but only a fair one.
Peter Steele's next book of poems, Invisible Riders , is to be published this year.