Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 64
ISBN: 9781854112415
Publication date: November 10, 1998
Price: £6.95
Signs Round a Dead Body is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Deryn Rees-Jones’s widely acclaimed first collection, The Memory Tray. Her humour, sharp technique and preoccupation with the dilemmas of women are as apparent as ever, but there is now a more intense personal focus.
Love, in all its permutations, suffuses this book, and sensuous details abound: from poems like ’Making Out’ and ’From His Coy Mistress’, about the fears and vacillations of love, to the disillusionment of the Nerudian ’Songs of Despair.’ Informed by a sensibility at once passionate, intelligent and ironic, this new collection confirms Rees-Jones’s place at the forefront of contemporary poetry.
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
