Rego Retold review – poems make you look at Rego’s work with fresh attention

So many of Paula Rego’s paintings are of people caught in the act – but the acts are often ambiguous and the stories that surround them enigmatic. Do we want these incomparable paintings demystified and extended as narratives? The danger is that a poem will be attached to a painting like an artificial limb that readers will immediately want to reject.

Owen Lowery is the author of a praised debut, Otherwise Unchanged, that reflects on a life that did change when his career as a British judo champion ended after a severe spinal injury. He is a respectful, questing, mannerly writer, aware of the possible liberty of writing about Rego’s paintings and the complication that many are inspired by existing narratives (Jane Eyre, Snow White, the Bible), by paintings (Hogarth’s sequence Marriage à-la-mode) and a poem (Moth by Blake Morrison).