PETER OLDS
Doctor Bell
Freud was everywhere:
under the bed...
I was your last patient for the day,
Thank God you're here you said
lighting a cigarette
& offering me one
with a quote from The Art of Loving.
The room filled with smoke.
You swivelled your chair
showing a leg
& pulled open the window overlooking
the hospital carpark for air...
I dictated & you wrote the script.
The act was some sort of fuck.
Peter Olds has published several volumes of poetry, as well as broadsheets, and his influence on younger New Zealand poets particularly in the 1970s was of considerable significance. His poems have been included in key anthologies and his own work was collated in It Was a Tuesday Morning: Selected Poems 1972-2001, which spans almost thirty years of his work. In 2005 Peter Olds was one of two recipients of the inaugural Janet Frame Literary Awards.
Olds comments: 'Doctor Bell (not her real name) was my psychiatrist for ten years in the seventies. We were both smokers.'
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