Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854111166
Publication date: February 23, 1995
Price: £6.95
Out of stock
Deryn Rees-Jones’ lively debut collection explores issues of gender and identity, memory and desire, through witty juxtapositions of character, plot and theme. Formative poems resound with magical imagery, as in ‘The Great Mutando’ and recapture the dream-states of childhood where ‘Grandma in the Garden’ appears, not as a homely matriarch, but as a terrifying figure with “one wild Modigliani eye hooking the clouds.” Other poems focus on love, from initial erotic frisson to break up and “the strange geographies of hurt.” Also included are ambitious, various monologues like ‘Lovesong to Captain James T. Kirk’ and the provocative ‘Metamorphoses’ featuring a transvestite who dreams of being Marilyn Monroe.
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
