The poetry in Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones’s most recent collection, is also an attempt at sciagraphy, at locating the solidity behind a shadow, or the sincerity at the heart of a mistake. Although the book takes its name from the goddess of lyric poetry, a reader is likely to think first of errata. Rees-Jones plays on this throughout the book – one poem is titled “Erratum”; another mentions “a place in which a self resides and language empties out, / … error/errata, the scratchy being of is and was”. Here, the usually invisible progress of slow misremembering, of filtering or romanticizing, or of protective or censorious impulses – in short, “of love and all its erasures” – is made perceptible.

Rees-Jones implies that she saw the world off-kilter after the loss of her husband, the poet Michael Murphy, in 2009 (a subject she also explored in Burying the Wren, 2012). “Everything seemed different”, she writes. “… Everything seemed.” Her now muted hurt manifests itself in part through erasure poems (pieces in which some text is obscured, the writing itself in widow’s weeds or donning a blindfold). Each line of “Líadain and Cuirithir”, for example, is skewered by a strikethrough, adding force to Líadain’s claim that “my heart’s burnt out”. But what is most interesting is that even in the case of the severest maskings – those in “13 Numbered Fragments Keeping Barbara Hardy in Mind”, which is in fact fourteen fragments, mimicking a sonnet, and in which lengthy segments are blacked out – it remains possible, with the right light and a (literally) close reading, to discern the “erased” words. “Creative thinking sounds closer to a lie” reluctantly emerges; as does “the poet must over-read and over-interpret the moment of writing”, which implies a process of redaction in writing from memory; so do the words “the discomfort”, “I am learning to be surprised again and to suffer my own dismay”, and “broken”.

The “human remains” in Erato’s opening poem, “Erasure”, foreshadow these inhumed presences and their resurfacings. In it Rees-Jones revisits Paris, retracing steps she once took with her husband, and watches her son “drawing and getting frustrated as he left a mark, erased it, left another mark on the paper … the old marks still showed through. They dented the paper like stretchmarks, little scars”. While some of the autobiographical prose poetry here feels less than inevitable, as if parts might be interchangeable, this is seldom a problem. Erato draws power from its concept, its suggestion of beloved memory as palimpsest, as much as from the writing that that concept generates. What’s more, its more traditional lyric poems, such as “I.M.” and “A Courtship”, grow touchingly, waveringly unstable in the context of the rest of the book.

Fires, a lyric essay written to supplement an exhibition called The Errant Muse at the University of Liverpool, is a less developed companion work. In it, Rees-Jones announces an intention to “nudge towards asking, what might we call – for a moment at least – a philosophy of lyric poetry”. Erato and Fires draw from the same pool of references (Woolf’s “Poetry: a voice answering a voice”, for example) and recurring images, such as the fires that “keep returning, re-igniting” throughout both works, and the interplay of poetry and quotidian existence: the “prosody” of making tea, the “metrics of being alone” (Erato); the poet’s “iamb- / ulatory” movement (Fires). Rees-Jones hedges, with “for a moment at least”, perhaps because it takes some work to establish what her philosophy is. Fires is bitty and etiolated, both as essay and as poetry: white space almost smothers the words. This is not irksome in itself, but as quotations start to feel haphazardly inserted (Stephen Hawking, Deleuze and Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Sylvia Plath?) it can become so. In some ways this reads more like a commonplace book.

Returning to Erato, to a poem also titled “Fires”, might help. “Fires” describes a boy whose foster carer once found him setting fire to a chair. To the carer, this was a relief: “His usual response to his unbearable pain was to self-harm”. Making the best of the discovery, “they arranged the building of future fires (poems?) – safely, out of sight”. Comparing the writing of poems to the construction of cathartic fires comes close to recommending poetry as a therapeutic tool. But in Fires, Rees-Jones lists varied applications, including “poetry as autobiography”, “devastation”, “falsehood”, “home”, “utopia” and, in another hedge, “x, y, z” – though “sublimation” is one of its uses, she will not seal poetry in a first-aid box. Finally, she circles warily back around to Erato’s central idea, to “Poetry as the marks of movement, poetry as loss?” That may not be everybody’s philosophy of lyric poetry, as the shadowy Erato may not feel like every lyric poet’s muse, but it is fair to call it Deryn Rees-Jones’s – for a moment at least.

Deryn Rees-Jones’s Erato (Seren) takes its title from the classical muse for love poetry and song. A mix of lyric essays and verse forms, the book returns fluidly and insightfully to the relationship between the self and memory, in particular trauma and loss. “I thought about truth and I thought about lies. I thought about love and all its erasures.” Erato also suggests erratum, or error, another preoccupation of the psyche as it holds and withholds time from the collective and the individual: a lover, a neighbour, a metamorphosing animal or tree. Rees-Jones moves between prose and poetry as if to test language in the act of transfiguration. Her imagination interpolates the personal body in the political and natural worlds with deep sensuousness, a muscular intelligence.

This fifth collection by Deryn Rees-Jones is an invocation to Erato, classical Muse of lyric poetry and songs, whose name means ‘lovely’ or ‘beloved’. Yet in the poet’s hands, Erato’s lovely face is pixelated, blurred, transformed into her shadow guise: goddess of error, errancy and erasure. The collection’s narrative arc explores how ‘the scribble mess’ of self is constituted ‘by what we love’ and thus, inevitably, through slippage, failure and loss. It also offers a precise, darkly funny exploration of ‘middle age’ with its divagations, its difficult movements: ‘What stepping in / and back and on / is this, this middle age?’, cries the voice of ‘Firebird’.

The theme of error is registered through traumatic repetition: the ‘face blackened to a shroud of bees’, the ghostly ‘nucleus of / shadow’ that the speaker seeks to ‘run my hands / across’ are images that recur in surreal, painterly fashion (Rees-Jones acknowledges her indebtedness to artist Paula Rego). But bereavement and ‘heartbreak’ are seen, not just as terrifyingly empty spaces, but as passionate states in their own right, electric in their disordering/reordering of time and self – and thus, potentially generative.

Like Rees-Jones’s previous works, Erato is centrally concerned with the body: poems take in a loved one’s amputated limb, the bodies of saints; observed bodies, the political body; bodies as forensic materials or artefacts. Probing the strategies by which corporeality is erased, monitored, and understood in the contemporary, technological world, it asks: how do we think about, memorialise and experience, our body, others’ bodies?

This poet’s quirky experimentalism serves her aim to bend and break the limits of the lyric, in order to link the personal with the planetary. Melding documentary reportage with lyrical reminiscence, she includes prose-like pieces structured like sonnets, poems approximating song lyrics (‘Autumn Leaves’ echoes Leonard Cohen and Jacques Prévert’s ‘Feuilles mortes’), poems that use strikethrough and blanking-out techniques to foreground the erasure that is usually hidden in digital print.

Environmental destruction hovers over the collection, the felt shadow (like middle age) of an imperceptible tipping-point. ‘Mon Amour’ depicts the flickering black-and-white scenes of the film Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras, hinting at desire dreamt in and through environmental devastation; an elderly family member on the point of death is imagined poignantly as ‘a lost child or a sea-fox in a blazing world, that lone seal on a stone.’ At times, the collection is almost unbearably urgent (it even witnesses the Notre Dame fire of April 2019), half-overwhelmed by what the author calls ‘the siren … [of] the modern world, a … sound of danger and distress’. It bravely explores the possibility (impossibility?) of poetry in a world where everything is in a state of assault, everywhere a conflict zone, asking, ‘What was the difference between a sigh and a song?’

The bricolage feel of the poems – their ‘sound debris’ – matches the ‘bright hard LEGO pieces that never seem to have a chance to be stuck together’ depicted in ‘Palisade’. Yet while this is a collection proper to the plastic age, it retains an intense sense of kinship with the natural world: the ‘Courtship’ sequence directs a keen eye to the love-making practices of birds, signalling in its slow rhythms and imagistic mirroring a continued belief in the possibility of bringing together language and world, lover and lover. Tracing the twists and turns of Erato, Rees-Jones offers a collection that is giddily disorienting, incandescent, bleak – and yet, at heart, graciously optimistic.

A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.

Deryn Rees-Jones' Erato is a devastating return to form.

The core of the book is a number of prose poems, spinning out and away from grief but with absence as a centre. The texts focus in on the momentary, on remembered details, and move by association and emotion as much as time or narrative. In between are more individual poems, sometimes brief observational lyrics, including a sonnet sequence and a poem after Rimbaud.

'Imagine a landscape folded into a room' is the opening line of 'Cell', and this for me is the nub of these poems, memory, ideas and images folded up within the room, or self, of the poem. There is a surety and lightness of touch here, with the author re-presenting her memories but leaving us to make a choice of how to respond to them. The poems are certainly melancholic and moving. 

   Concentrated and erotic, or something

   Unbeautiful
                                                              Or something
   in the spaces between?

she writes in 'Fires' when discussing the work of Julia Kristeva, as the text moves from parental intervention and concern, to Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, and on through Freud and Elizabeth Bishop, through Kristeva to Dylan Thomas. Yet this is no academic treatise, this is the literary world the poet inhabits, it's as natural a progression and digression as bird watching and gardening are elsewhere. It also summarises how this poetry is working, leaving room in 'the spaces between' for the reader.

Erato finds its author balancing the fact she remains both lost and at home in the world, mixing the vivid and luminous present with the past. Her nostalgia is controlled and shaped, her eye alert to the foibles of memory and grief. This is a wonderful, lyrical collection, full of bright language and love.