Elizabeth Bartlett’s powerfully evocative poems are remarkable for their painfully truthful insights into people’s lives. She worked for many years in the Health Service, and Peter Forbes has called her poetry’s chronicler of today’s ‘damaged Britain’…‘She writes about people in extreme states, some of which she has experienced herself…’ In her 80th birthday collection, Mrs Perkins and Oedipus, she mourns the loss of her husband and squares up to ill fortune, but recalls past loves and times with openness, honesty and stoically grouchy humour.