Name: Flirting on an Escalator
SKU: 1136
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Flirting on an Escalator

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Flirting On An Escalator
Bettina Schroeder

Flirting on an Escalator is a sparky clutch of poems from a writer excited by the mundane things in life. Bettina Schroeder revels in the joys of travel on London buses, of passing through the netherworld of airports (Airport Groupie), of teeming life around the Arsenal’s stadium (I Had Never Seen Arsenal Play BUT I Knew the Outside Inside Out), of wandering like a twenty first century Dickens through the streets of London (London Is), of sitting on a bench observing life eyes wide open smiling to herself (Benches). She sings of women playing football rather than seductively reclining nude on a chaise longue (The Game). She trawls her memories (Where Have All The Sofas Gone?).

All this with an acute eye, with humanity and with humour. These are sensuous poems that reward the reader. The arresting cover is a clue.
When she was seven her family escaped to the West and settled in Wolfsburg where her father built Volkswagens (My Father Would Have Built That Car. She came here in the eighties and has absorbed our culture but still with a vision one step to one side. Her humanity reminds me of a couple of my favourite writers, the Soviet dissident Vasily Grossman and the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski. Both have European sensibilities skewed differently from our own and both share the same humanity and excitement in the life that surrounds them as does Bettina. No insularity here.

She also draws and paints, takes groups on painting seminars around Europe and North Africa and plays esoteric improv music with a bow on her electric ukulele.
What can I say? Read this book.
Hank Wangford