Sunny Prestatyn     

Come To Sunny Prestatyn

Laughed the girl on the poster,

Kneeling up on the sand   

In tautened white satin.   

Behind her, a hunk of coast, a

Hotel with palms

Seemed to expand from her thighs and   

Spread breast-lifting arms.

 

She was slapped up one day in March.   

A couple of weeks, and her face

Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;   

Huge tits and a fissured crotch

Were scored well in, and the space   

Between her legs held scrawls

That set her fairly astride

A tuberous cock and balls

 

Autographed Titch Thomas, while   

Someone had used a knife

Or something to stab right through   

The moustached lips of her smile.   

She was too good for this life.   

Very soon, a great transverse tear   

Left only a hand and some blue.   

Now Fight Cancer is there.

 

Sunny Prestatyn- Content

The poem describes the sunny features of an advertising billboard for holidaying in Prestatyn, guiding our eyes across the woman within the poster. Perhaps a metaphor for the cruel world of commercialism, this poem explores the distortion between perfection and reality and in the violent backlash of a graffiti artist at the women's non- existence, Larkin could be attacking the role of advertisement, both in its unattainable images of females in the pornographic business, but also in the deceiving ideals it paints in front of us to encourage the jealous, materialistic person to riot an turn to crime.

Analysis

The poem takes on a snowballing structure as we see the relaxed, inviting connotations of 'sunny' and the liberty and limitless possibilities it depicts from the posters 'expanding' and 'separating' setting, disintegrate into the colloquial and abrupt declaratives of the end. This too, is mirrored in the rhyme scheme, from initial half rhymes in 'satin' and 'Prestatyn' to full rhymes indicating that now, the full and realistic picture as oppose to that utopian portrayal is known.

 

Throughout the poem, there is an uncomfortable sense of male ownership and patriarchy, from the demanding imperative that opens, 'come to Sunny Prestatyn' to the woman's 'moustached lips' and its autographed 'Titch Thomas'. Here the female can be seen very much as male property, her body appears objectified in its 'taunted' description that undoes the pure, innocent 'white satin'. The Slapping up of the poster implies a lack of care which can perhaps be applied to the woman, who comes across cheap and colloquial in the eyes of the observer, supporting the objectification of her body as having no purpose. As a result, a strong lexical field of violence is evident in the final stanza, 'knives' scoring and stabbing, which is perhaps a reflection of the impact of advertisement, much like the fantastical image of Prestatyn, the perfected portrayal of the woman is unattainable and drives a violent frustration in 'Titch Thomas' whose name implies his small and inadequate feelings of failure when looking at such fantastic images.

 This leads to the question of whether this poem is a narration of unrealistic women, not living up to expectation, the pronoun 'she' is poignant before 'is too good for this life' as it indicates it is the woman that is unattainable here. Yet perhaps this has a wider context, that commercialism in general initiates such worrying lack of satisfaction on our lives and drives a violent thirst for something more. An idea that dominates much of his collection, the corrupted deception of the Faith Healer and the dishonesty of the Large Cool Store, and has been described as Larkin's 'trademark antipathy towards the modern world'.

 

The poem concludes on a very unsettling image of the 'fight cancer' poster that replaces the once 'laughing', now 'snuggle-toothed and boss-eyed' woman, perhaps Larkin is cruelly pointing out that this idea is more realistic than such a perfected woman and exotic setting. As a realist poet, it is an abrupt line to highlight that we cannot sugar coat society due to the catastrophic effect we saw it have on Titch Thomas and the feelings of failure that it brings, the statement engages the reader to reflect on how they have been affected by such images.