Poetry
Category: Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 186
ISBN: 9781781723388
Publication date: September 12, 2016
Price: £12.99
Out of stock
‘What It’s Like To Be Alive is a chance to reflect on the depth of Rees-Jones’s poetry to this point, and to see the growth of a fierce poetic intelligence.’– Poetry Ireland Review
Deryn Rees-Jones’s new book, What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems, marks a mid-career milestone in the life of this highly-acclaimed writer. From the poems written in her teens and early twenties included in her exciting debut The Memory Tray to her most recent exploration of time and grief, we see the arc of development in her writing over twenty-five years as she visits and revisits the concerns that are the mainstay of her writing: memory, love, desire, and heartbreak in all its manifestations.
In her second collection Signs Round A Dead Body she continues to explore love and loss with praise poems and elegies that draw as much on Walt Whitman and Neruda as they do on a tradition of Welsh writing. The long-poem turned murder-mystery ‘Quiver’ is represented by a number of poems in the sequence, that see her playing with genre to explore the nature of female creativity, motherhood, and belief.
The author’s T.S. Eliot prize-nominated, Burying the Wren, features largely in the second half of the book. Rees-Jones here consolidates and concentrates her powers with poems that confront personal tragedy: the loss of a husband to cancer. Continuing to develop her use of the poetic sequence, Dogwoman, inspired by the pictures of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, explores how we can be fully alive in language even in the depths of sorrow.
With this knowledge of grief, Rees-Jones assays the life of Helen Thomas, the young widow of the poet Edward Thomas, exploring the complexities of marriage and the relationship between the body, perception and memory in And You, Helen.
The book concludes with a brand new long poem, ‘ i.m.’ an elegy which explores the power of memorialisation while testifying to the power of hope. This substantial volume is a tribute to the maturing voice of an essential poet.
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
