Come To Sunny Prestatyn
The opening line of the poem is actually a commercial. The poem is about a travel poster (a billboard, essentially) urging train riders to come to Prestatyn. Not that it is entirely essential to any understanding of the poem, but it certainly helps to learn that Prestatyn is a Welch coastal community situated along the Irish Sea side of the United Kingdom located slightly to the southwest of Liverpool. But, again, that information it not absolute vital for appreciating the poem, but it never hurts to get one’s bearings before diving in verse.
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand
In tautened white satin.
What is far more essential for understanding and appreciating the poem is that the slogan urging commuters to visit Prestatyn for their climate was on a poster dominated by the image of an attractive young woman posed laughing on the sand. This is the real meat of the poem; the slogan could conceivably have applied to any resort town famed for its sun and sand. It is the the girl that becomes the center of the poetic narrative. These lines follow immediately upon the slogan which does not feature any punctuation.
She was slapped up one day in March.
A couple of weeks, and her face
Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed;
In between the above lines and those quoted here is further description of how the girl was originally conceived as advertisement. By the second stanza, that original imagery is no longer in place. Time has passed since the poster went up as originally designed in March and by now the work of vandals has transformed her rather comprehensively. The defacing described here is just the face; the lines that follow are more graphic in their delineation of how her image has undergone a similarly transgressive transformation from the waist down. Suffice to say that the “subliminal” exploitation of the model as sex object has become much more liminal; the vandalism is vulgar and leaves nothing to the imagination. This degeneration from essentially innocent sex object to victim of violent sexual assault is subtly connected to the speaker’s own view of the model with the choice of “slapped” to describe how the poster was originally put on display.
Someone had used a knife
Or something to stab right through
The moustached lips of her smile.
The association of violence with sexuality is further engendered by the description of the last example of how the poster has been vandalized. The connection of “knife” with “stab” on the way to revelation that the defacing has even sunk to the childish level of painting a mustache on the girl is itself so filled with potential meaning and possibilities that an entire essay could be written just on these three lines. Within these lines is not just the continuance of line that connects advertising and vandalism with objectification of women, but the now there is the additional introduction of gender transformation.
Now Fight Cancer is there.
The poem ends on an ironic note that is also worthy of an essay in and of itself. Because the poster of the girl was advertising tourism for an entire town and not any specific business located there, both it and the poster which is now visible in place of where the Prestatyn poster has been torn completely away qualify as public service announcements more than mere outdoor commercial. But, of course, “Come to Sunny Prestatyn” is leagues away from “Fight Cancer” on the spectrum of public service announcements. The irony here certainly goes deeper than just replacing a healthy and attractive young woman with the cautionary note about becoming a victim of cancer.
