Ageing ruth fainlight biography

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   How do the structure, form and content of 'Ageing' by Ruth Fainlight reflect the significance of the poem's title?

   Age is the central theme of the poem 'Ageing', as its title indicates. Throughout the poem, key words signifying time highlight the contrast between past and present - 'Since', 'Now', 'When'. There is a Part 1 and a Part 2, which could be interpreted as the two chapters of life. The phrase '(say around forty)' points to the past, and the fact that the phrase is bracketed reinforces the idea that it is bracketed in memory; it is in the past. The contrast between youth and old age is also described - the speaker tells us 'Now that I'm really old' and that 'roller-skating / That used to be my favourite

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Ruth Fainlight

Ruth Fainlight (b. New York, 1931) is an award-winning poet and translator, whose collections, starting with Cages in 1966, have spanned five decades. Her 1976 collection Another Full Moon was described by Peter Porter as having “the steadiness and clarity of the moon itself”, and A S Byatt has said of her poems that they “give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events”. Fainlight has lived in England since the age of 15, achieving success in fiction, translation and opera libretti as well as poetry. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.

On the process of writing a poem, Fainlight has said: “Like every other living organism, its development is a unique combination of unassailable laws and the entirely unexpected”. One hallmark of her work is the special attention she pays to the apparently ordinary stuff of life, finding strangeness and even mysticism beneath familiar surfaces. Domestic life

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Ruth Fainlight was born in New York City, but has lived in England since the age of fifteen.  After adjusting to the English educational struktur, she went to art college, lived for some years in France and Spain, and later married the writer Alan Sillitoe.  They now divide their time between a flat in London and a cottage in a Somerset village. 

Ruth Fainlight has published thirteen  collections of poems in England and the USA, as well as two volumes of short stories, and translations from French, Portuguese and Spanish.  Selections of her own poems have been published in book form in Portuguese, French and Spanish translation. 

She received the Cholmondeley Award in 1994, and her 1997 collection, Sugar-Paper Blue, Bloodaxe Books 1997 & Dufour Editions USA 1998, was shortlisted for the 1998 Whitbread Award.

Her latest collection  is Burning Wire, Bloodaxe & Dufour 2002. 

In 1985 and 1990 she was Poet in Residence at Vanderb