Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 84
ISBN: 9781854113542
Publication date: May 10, 2004
Price: £9.99
Intended to be read from beginning to end, Quiver is a book-length poem – a murder-mystery – which explores the nature of creativity.
Fay Thomas, a poet with writer’s block, becomes a murder suspect after she stumbles over the body of her husband’s former lover, Mara, as she runs one morning in a local cemetery. Set in a year when Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday coincide with Chinese New Year celebrations for the Year of the Horse, Fay slowly begins to find her own voice as her poems become interspersed with the narrative.
With the help of her friend Erica, trailed by a bewildered policeman and haunted by a ghostly figure, she tracks the killer through the docklands of Liverpool, before the final dramatic showdown in Chinatown.
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
