This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Zelda Zingari’s poems appear in the London Review of Books and in volume form from messrs Faber. The collections have titles like Thunder Strikes in the Zodiac Garden and Trilobite Dreaming.
Of her last one, Necromancing the Stone, the Guardian’s critic pronounced that she had “come tantalisingly close to forging a new aesthetic, whose fundamentals lie in a no-nonsense figurative language and some altogether striking perversions of form”.
Photographs of her extremely striking physiognomy, sometimes shaven-headed, on other occasions topped by flowing purple tresses, are regularly on display in the Sunday supplements.
What does Zelda write about? In an interview given to the yearly magazine of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a fellow, she remarked that she was interested in “extreme states, margins, portals, gateways between the known and unknown, the mind’s masquerade at the tether’s end”.
Unrhymed, unscanned and apparently unrevised, her poems incline to the fragmentary, and are distinguished by the absence of definite articles (“The,” Zelda has famously observed, “is one of the most blatant types of linguistic constraint.”)
There have been attempts to compare Zelda to J.H. Prynne
They are also flamboyantly punctuated. Cow-hoof treads frightening greensward! What does pond-bound mallard’s quaking quack portend? began “The Path to Net Zero”, which appeared in last month’s LRB.
As to Zelda’s position in the ranks of modern English Literature, there have been attempts to compare her to J.H. Prynne, although, in faint demurral, the Times Literary Supplement has suggested that “a certain willed obscurantism may debar her from the front rank of the post-post-modernists”.
Just lately her work has taken a political turn. “Gaza Eclogue”, for example, which appeared as a pamphlet from the Loosestrife Press with a Banksy silhouette on the cover, talks about arid shapes, bald eagle flying over smashed sand, Jew adieu, and she is thought to have addressed a fringe meeting of the recent Your Party conference on “Late Capitalism and the Hegemony of the Lyric”. Unfortunately, “Jeremy Jeremiad” (mouse-marauding white-whiskered wainscot-skulker) precedes this conversion and is thought to be an elegy to a dead cat.
Of Zelda’s private life, little can be said beyond what was vouchsafed to a Guardian interviewer who ran her to earth in Muswell Hill, living companionably in a terraced house with an individual known as “Zorb”, to whom several of her collections have been dedicated.
There is talk of a memoir which will lay bare some of the secrets of what was supposedly a fraught and perilous early life, distinguished by a decades-long struggle to “cut loose from conformity and become the person I was meant to be”.
Her parents, the Revd and Mrs Zingari, live in retirement in Eastbourne, where they volunteer for the local food bank and take great delight in cutting out newspaper articles for inclusion in a scrapbook marked “Zelda’s Poems”.
