Miniskirts in the Waste Land (Paperback or Softback)

Miniskirts in The Waste Land, set in Notting Hill and India, is an elegy for the late 60s/early 70s. In flamboyant contrast to the drab reality of post WW2 Britain, the air in these years of emerging counterculture, the era of the pill, throbbed with the scents and sounds of youth, the blazing hues of psychedelia. These poems portray a young woman's search for self-knowledge, and love. But the heady freedom of the sexual revolution masks a darker side: a fear of loneliness, the realities of the Vietnam war. Along the way, she discovers the joys and disappointments of young love, explores the 'queendom' of motherhood, has a taste of her inner power till, in the end, the 'jangled' voices from her past 'fade' along with 'voices of the jungle'. Peace, however transient, descends upon her.

Miniskirts in The Waste Land offers, for the curious, a glimpse into this vanished world. And for those who were there, the tantalising ghost of Patchouli scent and incense.

"Pratibha Castle's Waste Land, like that other, read in English class by the pamphlet's convent school-educated speaker, is a multi-faceted landscape of people and place, snapshots of brief connections, lives held taut by fear and loneliness. From the wide-eyed, 'skank of damp' bedsit realities of a young woman adrift in late '60s/early '70s London, to the squalor of an escaped-to India, Castle uses vivid, unforgettable sensory imagery to release from the page a psychedelic blast of protest, betrayal, ''Nam nightmares', fleeting intimacy, loss. Her eye for key details is pin-sharp: in London, unwelcoming women with 'pecking gossip' have 'Princess Margaret scarves / knotted tight as knuckles'; in India, with its rats and 'roaches, beggars' wrists are 'a bangle-clash of need'. But Castle luminously relieves the tense and the tawdry with her deft depiction of tender moments: where lovers 'licked sugar trickles / off each other's chins', and, in Leaven, an exquisite hymn to pregnancy, a woman 'Coaxes loaves / out of their tins / as if from cradles'. This is language, poetry, to reach out and touch, taste, savour."

Dawn Gorman

"Here is a vivid and sensual poetry of short lines and sharp images that carry the fortunate reader all the way from Portobello Market to Mahatma Gandhi Road in India - 'the air a ferment// of patchouli, rotten apples'. These poems are vividly-drawn snapshots of a time, and mind, and place - and I am very much drawn in."

Jean Atkin

Pratibha Castle, Irish born, currently resident in Sussex, wrote her first poem, aged fifty eight, while studying English and Creative Writing on a BA at the University of Chichester. Anthologised and published in numerous print and e journals including Agenda, High Window, International Times, London Grip, Orbis, Sarasvati, Spelt, and Stand, she received her first writing award at the age of nine. She has since been highly commended, long listed and given special mention in a number of competitions including Indigo Dreams, Binsted Arts, Bray Festival, Sentinel, Welsh Poetry Competition and Bridport Prize. Her first book A Triptych of Birds & A Few Loose Feathers, was joint winner in Hedgehog Poetry Press competition Nicely Folded Paper 2019. A former singer, artist, holistic workshop facilitator, her current obsession - apart from writing - is to stop the slugs devouring her garden.