Poem: ‘A Funny Smell’
Gareth Reeves, 3 October 1985
‘It couldn’t have,’ said the rat man, ‘Warfarin makes them head for the open, gasping.’ It had slunk under the floor to decompose. Father: ‘It’s Brooke again, he’s smelling’ – Brooke being the critic who had slammed him – and we’d chorus it round the house, holding our noses.
Not the stuff of poetry, rotting rats. Yeats...