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Note on The Night Porter 

From the 1974 film, Il portiere di notte, starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. Thirteen years after World War Two, a female concentration camp survivor meets the Nazi officer who once subjected her to a sado-masochistic relationship. They continue where they left off. The poem, like the film, deals with the tricky subject of consensual S and M, found in many relationships and in even more fantasies. The trouble here, of course, is that she was habituated, initially, under pressure. How free then, once debauched, is she?

Alan Marshfield

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