Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115768
Publication date: September 3, 2012
Price: £8.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 72
ISBN: 9781854115980
Publication date: September 3, 2012
Price: £7.19
Out of stock
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 TS ELIOT PRIZE
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2013
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Autumn 2012
“contains poems that leave me speechless, at the same time so simple and so complicated that my words fail and only hers will do.” – TLS
“Burying the Wren is a major event and achievement in the poetry of these islands.” – Ian Duhig
“A powerful, deeply moving collection…” – John Burnside
“…her language is so mesmeric… A powerful intelligence is at work in Rees-Jones’s poems.” – The Warwick Review
“…a wintry, wide-ranging and deeply felt collection” – New Welsh Review
“Burying the Wren is an accomplished collection, its emotive centre never allowed to drift clear of time and space.” – Eyewear Blog
In Burying the Wren Deryn Rees-Jones returns to familiar preoccupations but with a new clarity and maturity of vision. With intense lyricism she calls on the Roethkean ‘small things’ of the universe — truffles, slugs, trilobites, birds, stones, feathers, flowers, eggs — which, mysterious, and magical as well as ordinary — she sets up against loss. Her sequence of ‘Dogwoman’ poems, which draws on the work of artist Paula Rego, is an extended elegy to her late husband, the poet and critic Michael Murphy. Above all these are poems of the body, “…the blue heartstopping pulse at the wrist”, which are alive to the world and the transformative qualities of love.
Deryn Rees-Jones
Deryn Rees-Jones was educated at the University of Wales, Bangor, and Birkbeck College, London. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, and The Memory Tray (Seren Books, 1995) was shortlisted for a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. In 1996 she received an Arts Council of England Writer’s Award. Her collection of work includes: Signs Round A Dead Body (Seren Books, 1998), Quiver (Seren Books, 2004), Consorting With Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005), Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005) and And You, Helen (Seren Books, 2014), a meditation on Helen and Edward Thomas, illustrated by Charlotte Hodes. In 2010 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Deryn’s poetry collection Burying the Wren was on the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. Erato (2019) was again a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is also the author of Paula Rego: The Art of Story (Thames & Hudson 2019) and the lyric essay Fires (Shoestring, 2019). She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024.
Her collection What It’s Like to be Alive: Selected Poems (Seren, 2016) (Poetry Book Society Special Commendation) is a mid-career milestone of this highly-acclaimed writer.
Deryn Rees-Jones is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool, and editor of the Pavilion Poetry list, part of Liverpool University Press.
Photo credit: Alison Dodd
