Questions from a forty-something single male

What size is your home?
Are your tastes expensive?
How well-travelled are you?
Is your bank balance extensive?
Are you clever and kind?
How large are your breasts?
Can I send you a picture
of things other than pecs?
Can you cope alone
or will you be needy?
Do you ooze poise and class?
Can you also act seedy?
Are your kids off your hands?
Won't you be on my case?
Have you got any issues?
Will you give me my space?
What car do you drive?
How big is your ex?
How much do you earn?
Would you like to have sex?

Maria Stephenson's is a poetry of lived experience. She is a 'witness' in the most authentic sense and has endured the mental pain upon which she now reflects. The book from which this poem is taken - Poetry for the Newly Single 40 Something - is a profound testament to survival, re-alignment and emergence, and her message is a lesson in hope.

Stephenson's art reflects a troubled life. From the wreck of an abusive and deformed relationship, her poetry has built something approximating to contentment out of the cathartic properties of words, yielding an illustration of the therapeutic powers of creativity.

Insightful, fully cognisant of the ambiguities and ambivalences which inhere to marital breakdowns, Stephenson is never less than poetically even-handed.

She remains aware that a sense of loss is at least as significant as the knee-jerk impulse to condemn the author of the pain, in the early stages of separation. And to this degree, her poetry is inclusive: it is infused with a bitterness, which is, in turn, sweetened by the memory of a love once shared.

To acknowledge the polychromatic strata of relationships is to claim relief from their worst excesses, and the wisdom of evolving emotions is measured in Stephenson's deeply affecting words.

Such ambiguity is central to our Poem of the Week. Conceived in a rollicking, rhythmical metre which deliberately betrays the pointing of an accusatory finger, 'Questions from a forty-something single male' is a litany of traumatised female expectation. Which is not to doubt that the questions identified are an accurate representation of the self-serving subtext of the middle-aged male agenda. Bar room braggadocio at its most vocal, the inventory of questions is an extreme reflection of an unpalatably sexist truth.

The still fragile narrator is vulnerable and suspicious and her arch delivery echoes an urge to render male motives homogeneous. That it is 'twinned' later in the volume with a poem - 'Questions from a Picky Female' - which partially reverses the telescope, underlines both Stephenson's instinct for parity, and her integrity as a poet.

Stephenson's insight enables laughter as we condemn the unworkably ridiculous and offensive list of male 'demands', and it would be a peculiarly thick-skinned man who didn't recognise an irony here.

'Questions from a forty-something single male' is taken from Poetry for the Newly Single 40 Something, and is published by Stairwell Books.