Signs Round a Dead Body

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."The pick of the crop, a magician with attitude, pinning ideas down but at the same time giving them time to breathe"Ian McMillan, Poetry Review"Mighty poems... a direct line to the remembered and imagined life - so rare in writers, rarer still in young writers... her general reverence for bodies, and her generous remembrance of them makes her readers feel alive in ways they haven't felt before... It is not nostalgia, it is transport and return"Thomas Lynch 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 was shortlisted for a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. In 1996 she received an Arts Council of England Writer's Award. She lives in Liverpool, where she lectures at the University of Liverpool.