Poem of the month

selected by David Underdown

Party Time

by Elaine Feinstein

It’s lovely in the bathroom:
green marble floor, cool tiles
and trailing plants. Sometimes
I can’t think why anybody wants
to plod around a room explaining
who they are and what they care about.
In here I am quite happy alone
with my own thought.

After a time, though, and long before
that urgent knock on the door, I remember
how, when things have gone most
seriously wrong, a group of people
no more intimate than this
have sometimes had the power to restore
a sense of who I am. It’s lovely
in the bathroom nevertheless:
but not for long.

In this short poem Elaine Feinstein describes a situation that many of us will find familiar: the ambivalent relationship that we have with being (or, worse, having to be) sociable. She brings the dilemma to life with wit and a tolerant, half-amused self knowledge. Elaine Feinstein was born in Liverpool and brought up in Leicester. She has had a long career as a poet, novelist, playwright, translator and biographer. This poem is taken from her collection ‘Daylight’ published by Carcanet.