Books Books Books
Category: Bestsellers, Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 77
ISBN: 9781781725108
Publication date: June 3, 2019
Price: £9.99
Category: Bestsellers, Ebooks, Individual Collections, Poetry
Number of pages: 77
ISBN: 9781781725115
Publication date: June 3, 2019
Price: £7.99
Out of stock
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2020
Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019
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.
In the narrative of transformations that unfold, the invocation of Erato also carries with it a sense of errata and erasure. As stories and ideas are repeated, and recurring imagery – of fires, bees, birds – is continually reframed, we are asked to replay, rethink, rename. How do we step out from the ‘perpetual loop’ of trauma? And how do we find a way of processing painful change? Here, bewilderment in the face of ongoing historical tragedy is countered by the Rees-Jones’s close and careful attention to immediate or remembered experience, and the importance of the body, whether this is lying awake at night with a sleepless child, the felling of a backyard tree, walking in Paris observing the encampments of refugees, or the dreamlike conversation she has with the radio about bombs and the use of drones.
Erato includes elegies for family members and close friends, including an impressive and moving long poem ‘I.M.’. Also included here is the autobiographical ‘Caprice’ in which Rees-Jones explores with musical abandon ‘the scribble-mess’ of self, and the ‘grainy, atomized emotion coursing through in middle age’.
Throughout Erato there is a compelling sense of continued curiosity, of thoughtful questioning, of questing for truths. The author’s background in the classics, her immersion in modern poetry as well as a deep interest in modern art, all combine to influence the essential quality of this work.
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
“A devastating return to form … a wonderful, lyrical collection, full of bright language and love.”
Rupert Loydell, Stride Magazine
‘…a forcefield book, a fierce and beautiful thing.’
Vona Groarke
‘Here is the poet as rhapsode, an open channel for giddily overlapping streams of grief, desire, bewilderment, awe and rage.’
Josh Cohen
‘Deryn Rees-Jones shows us that in the right hands lyric is the sharpest, subtlest and most devastating instrument we possess.’
Sasha Dugdale
‘Rees-Jones provides a means – a subjective register – for hearing what ‘circumstances of sound electrifies the heath, / open up the dark.’ With admirable exactness she charts the existential bewilderment that frustrated Freud, his narrow paradigms lacking the dimensionality of these unflinching poems.’
PN Review
‘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.’
Sandeep Parmar
