The Lovers

Tina Tranter and Maureen Duffy give an idealised picture of the love between men and women in written text and black and white photographs.

‘He sinks his face in the warm cave of her thighs smelling indistinguishably of her and the sea. The sun dries and burnishes her body. Flecks of salt linger in the folds of skin. He’s sleepy. He lies with his face turned into her side while she dreams above him.

‘We make love with all our senses. We taste and smell and touch each other, cry and murmur and fill our eyes with landscapes of each other’s bodies. We absorb each other through the pores of our skin. I breathe you in and your hands play over me like waves.

‘The rules are broken, that laid down what you could and couldn’t do, that made people into stereotypes of male and female, that said if you were a man you did that, if you were a woman you lay like that. Now there is only what you want and what I want that put together gives us what we want, sometimes one thing, sometimes another through all the variations of gesture and posture so that none of us need be unsatisfied.

‘That is what I would like to do to you.
That is what I would like you to do to me.
Even when we are too old to do anything except in our imagination and the pages of books.’

Large format hardcover. First edition. Good condition overall, light sun spotting on end-pages and wear to the edges of dust cover. 1971.