This article argues that older people – by virtue (at least in part) of their association with the past – lack visibility in dominant conceptions of the contemporary. With its (neo-) modernist emphasis on the innovative new, ‘the contemporary’ – as a descriptor of the present – aligns, prejudicially, with youth. The contemporary as category or concept is frequently discussed in metaphorical terms that align it with early phases of the life course. Within this frame older women are particularly troublesome to the discourse of the contemporary, wherein they represent a blockage in the flow of futurity. After offering a theorisation of the ways in which contemporary operates in these terms, the article concludes by considering two texts – a film, Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), and a play, debbie tucker green’s generations (2005) – both of which craft encounters with narratives of old age and gender, and are commonly regarded as ‘contemporary’ according to the terms outlined.

This article argues that lyric poetry is a form suited to contesting dominant ideas about masculinity because of its thematic and formal preoccupations with voice. It argues that voice offers a different way of viewing the social constrictions that accompany male experiences of ageing to the well-known theory of the mask of ageing. Through a study of a long history of Western lyric verse, which includes writers such as William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost and Philip Larkin, the article explores the significance of restricted breathing in relation to dominant norms of masculine reticence and the physiological deterioration of the vocal profile in age. It then explores the possibility of counter-voicings of masculinity in poems with intergenerational themes from a group of post-war British poets.