Retiree includes two sections: a collection of poems, called The Clockwork Gift, and a short thesis called Granny in the Canon. The Clockwork Gift is the major contribution to this PhD submission. It is a collection of short lyric poems about ageing and grandmotherhood in contemporary society. The collection began as a project to write grandmother poems and ended with a set of poems that represent the older self in the world. A very loose narrative thread links the poems in that the early poems reflect the beginning of active grandmotherhood and the later ones show physical decline and a tussle with spiritual or philosophical ideas. The contemporary view of age as, for example, less attractive than youth is made metaphorical in various guises such as an imaginary animal (the thike). Age is defined as the human m a state of bodily history.