This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Daughter II’ by Deryn Rees-Jones from her collection Burying the Wren. Deryn’s poem ‘Consider the Lillies’, first published by Modron Magazine, was recently Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry.

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Daughter II’ by Deryn Rees-Jones from her collection Burying the Wren. Deryn’s poem ‘Consider the Lillies’, first published by Modron Magazine, was recently Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry.


Our Friday Poem this week is ‘The Owl Husband’ by Deryn Rees-Jones, which appears in her collection Erato.

Named after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here, however, as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones asks questions about the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, she asks in one poem, between a sigh and a song? Erato’s themes are manifold but particularly focus on personal loss, desire and recovery, in the context of a world in which wars and displacement of people has become a terrifying norm.

Erato is available from the Seren website: £9.99
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