Books Books
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 112
ISBN: 9781781727843
Publication date: July 7, 2025
Price: £12.99
Category: Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 112
ISBN: 9781911752103
Publication date: July 7, 2025
Price: £10.39
Out of stock
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2026
“Extraordinary in its formal conception and emotional accuracy…” – The Telegraph
“This is simply extraordinary writing, laced with wonder and devastation…” – Joanna Klink
A sequel to her T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones’ remarkable new collection sees her returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world.
The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel’s pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds.
Playful, and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour’s fierce and formidable exploration of ‘the now’ and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen, and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.
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
“Few poets navigate the terrain of grief and memory with the same authority and daring… By the final page, Hôtel Amour has safely captured a poet at her absolute best: ferociously human, philosophically serious, and beautifully alert to the strangeness of bodies and time. To call this book a collection would do it a disservice. It is something far more expansive. Essential reading.”
CJ Wagstaff, Nation.Cymru
“Emotionally dissociative and cutting at turns, Hôtel Amour asks to be felt.”
Jenni Hampshire, Newcastle Poetry Festival
“This is a glorious, heartbreaking collection. To enter the corridors of Deryn Rees-Jones’s Hôtel Amour is to surrender to a kind of lyric transience, where time exists all at once. The body takes centre stage, remembering a life in fragments, observing a world in decline, trying to catch up with its own self. Vivid and dreamlike, these poems burn with the small and large fires of love.”
Tishani Doshi
“To read Hôtel Amour is to enter a fluid sensory dream, a vision of one ‘small life’ seen entirely through the lens of poetry, where nothing is ordinary or meaningless. Every pinpricked detail becomes a threshold to the past or the future, luminous, strange, and unfinished – a room in a hotel in Paris, a long love affair re-lived in memory, the view on a garden during the pandemic as a window is repaired and a virus ravages a woman’s body. Even the empty spaces and city monuments ‘[shake] with their harms.’ Deryn Rees-Jones inhabits the intensity of life up to the very end, where futurity is no longer possible and you glimpse what your body stood for. This is simply extraordinary writing, laced with wonder and devastation and ‘the sounds of eyelids opening and closing,’ giving back what it felt like to live.”
Joanna Klink
