English poet Rosemary Tonks was born in Gillingham, Kent. Her father, an engineer, died in Africa before Tonks’s birth and she was sent to boarding school as a young girl. In the late 1940s, Tonks married Michael Lightband, also an engineer. The couple lived in Calcutta, where Tonks had a paratyphoid fever, and Karachi, where she contracted polio that withered her right hand. Tonks taught herself to write and paint left-handed and wore a black glove on her right hand. After a stint in Paris, the couple returned to London in the mid-1950s, and Tonks began mixing with literary society. During this period, Tonks wrote two books of highly acclaimed poetry, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms (1963) and Iliad of Broken Sentences (1967). Tonks claimed affiliation with French poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and her poetry was edgy, metropolitan, and laced with acerbic wit. Critic Cyril Connolly noted then that “Miss Tonks’s hard-faceted yet musical poems have unexpected power,” and she was generally considered one of the best female poets of her generation. Tonks also wrote six novels, including Opium Fogs (1963) and The Halt During the Chase (1972), and reviewed widely.