What it’s really like to party with some of the biggest names in literature
Poet and artist Frieda Hughes writes about the experience of ditching her leg brace and venturing back out into the world after a period of injury-induced isolation: ‘I had quietly disengaged / From the post-operative leg brace, / Driven myself to the city, left my crutches in the car / And, for one brief evening, remembered London
THE FABER PARTY POEM
I was invited to their summer garden gathering,
Where editors polished their authors
And there was magic in the minds of those emerging
From literary isolation to drink and be merry.
I watched them dissolve slowly
Into their gins and prosecco
Like cubes of ice in their own fingers,
Fizzing with promise, each one more open
Then their last publication. I had quietly disengaged
From the post-operative leg brace,
Driven myself to the city, left my crutches in the car
And, for one brief evening, remembered London
As if I lived there in the warmth of many welcomes
Beneath the struggling sun of an almost-equinox,
And precautionary canopies against the possibility of rain.
I did not tell myself that I should be doing somethings else
In the punitive way that drives me to work.
Instead, I travelled the necessary miles
As if on a motorway holiday
Without an overnight stay.