Deryn Rees-Jones - Böcker

Paula Rego is an artist of astonishing power with a unique and unforgettable aesthetic. Taking its cues from the artist, this fascinating study invites us to reflect on the complexities of storytelling on which Rego’s work draws, emphasizing both the stories the pictures tell, and how it is that they are told. Deryn Rees-Jones sets interpretations of the pictures in the context of Rego’s personal and artistic development across sixty years. We see how Rego’s art intersects with the work of both the literary and the visual, and come to understand her rich and textured layering of reference: her use of the Old Masters; fiction, fairy tales and poems; the folk traditions of Rego’s native Portugal; and her wider engagement with politics, feminism and more. The result is a highly original work that addresses urgent and topical questions of gender, subject and object, self and other.

In 2009 Carol Ann Duffy became the first female Poet Laureate to much public acclaim. This study looks at Duffy’s work from her early development and involvement with the Liverpool poets in the 1970s, through to her most recent collection. It concentrates on the way in which Duffy develops her use of the dramatic monologue and the love poem and traces her interest in surrealism and a tradition of European modernism. While acknowledging the importance of her popular appeal the book also makes a case for Duffy as a serious and important poet who engages with key issues of gender and identity in innovative and important ways. Deryn Rees-Jones places Duffy at the forefront of a change in poetry in Britain, and sees her as a writer who both heralds and opens up the way for those writing after her.

Helen Thomas was widowed when her husband the war poet Edward Thomas was killed at the battle of Arras in 1917, and was left to bring up their three young children. On the centenary of the First World War Imagining Helen Thomas explores her loss, and the loss of all war widows, through poetry, prose and art. The book is one aspect of a wider project on war and widowhood by Rees-Jones and Hodes commissioned by the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which includes poetry, art, animation, performance, creative writing and education.Deryn Rees-Jones is a leading UK poet and academic. Seren has published her four poetry collections, most recently Burying the Wren (2011) which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the poetry section of Wales Book of the Year.Charlotte Hodes is a painter, ceramicist and collage maker on women's subjects who has exhibited widely.

What It’s Like to Be Alive: Selected Poems marks a career milestone for the highly-acclaimed Liverpool based poet, Deryn Rees-Jones. Readers will find generous selections from her previously published prize-winning individual collections. These poems are intimately lyrical and possessed of a ‘devastating emotional power’ –John Burnside.

Erato takes its title from the muse of lyric poetry. At the centre is an interrogation of the lyric as a vehicle to write the world, both the beauty and the horror. Drawing on documentary-style narratives of her life, combined with lyric reinventions, Rees-Jones asks questions about past, present and future, about the slippages of memory, all our errors and erasures, and the places we inhabit when processing trauma. It is a book full of flames and scars, landscape and animals, and at its heart the transformative music that runs beneath words, and the bodies we inhabit when we love.

“This is simply extraordinary writing, laced with wonder and devastation…” Joanna KlinkA sequel to her T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones’ remarkable new collection sees her returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world.The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel’s pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds.Playful, and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour’s fierce and formidable exploration of ‘the now’ and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen, and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.

Marie Stopes' work in the area of sexual health and contraception has left a lasting legacy, and she is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. Her Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties was first published in 1918, translated into thirteen languages and sold over a million copies. Stopes also ardently pursued her enthusiasm for literature throughout her life, writing novels, plays and poetry. Her novel Love's Creation, published in 1928, the year women obtained the vote, is a working through of the debates which she addressed both in her personal and public life: sexual relations, the relationship between the arts and sciences, the quest for female sexual fulfillment. Marie Stopes' campaigning on behalf of a more open attitude to women's sexuality, equality in marriage, and sexual health and contraception, and her opening of the first free birth control clinic in the British Empire in 1921, saw her at the centre of political controversy, not least in her battle with the Roman Catholic church. Love's Creation, republished here for the first time since 1928, offers fascinating insights into early twentieth-century women's writing, most notably Virginia Woolf's theories of female creativity / fulfilled female sexuality which is not under threat from motherhood; female economic and psychic freedom; and the social milieu of the time. It is an engaging and fast moving narrative with lively, well-drawn and unconventional characters. The novel poses important questions about women's choices and aspirations before, during and after marriage. Not surprisingly it also engages in still contemporary and vital debates about the relationship between the sciences and the arts, and theories of evolution.

In this pioneering critical study, Deryn Rees-Jones discusses the work of some of the major women poets of the last hundred years, showing how they have explored what it has meant to be a woman poet writing in a male-dominated poetic tradition.Beginning with Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, she shows how an older generation resisted easy categorisation by forging highly individual aesthetics and self-presentation. For Edith Sitwell, the woman poet was to be ‘as eloquent as a peacock’. Stevie Smith compared poetry to ‘a strong explosion in the sky’ but did not consider gender to be an important factor. Sylvia Plath, who admired the work of both these poets, wanted to write in a way which was ‘not quailing and whining’ but to produce ‘working, sweating, heaving poems born out the way words should be said.’ Anne Sexton, in her poem ‘Consorting with Angels’, writes that she is ‘tired of the gender of things’ ‘not a woman anymore,/ not one thing or the other’. But despite their brilliance, their perceived eccentricity – along with the suicides of Plath and Sexton – made these major figures difficult acts to follow.Deryn Rees-Jones then considers the poetry written in their wake, with essays covering poets such as Moniza Alvi, Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Lavinia Greenlaw, Selima Hill, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Medbh McGuckian, Alice Oswald and Jo Shapcott. While these women all have very different writing styles, Rees-Jones argues that common strategies emerge which link them to their poetic predecessors, showing how they have developed an aesthetic which allows them to explore their femininity. Taking account of the importance to these women of the work of their male contemporaries, her incisive essays open up new perspectives on the poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.Deryn Rees-Jones’s companion anthology Modern Women Poets is published at the same time as Consorting with Angels.

"Modern Women Poets" is the companion anthology to Deryn Rees-Jones's pioneering critical study, "Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets". While its selections illuminate and illustrate her essays, Deryn Rees-Jones's superb anthology works in its own right as the best possible introduction to a whole century of poetry by women. The anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing, while not isolating women's writing from its intersection with the work of male contemporaries. Tracing an arc from Charlotte Mew to Stevie Smith, from Sylvia Plath to the writing emerging from the Women's Movement, and to the more recent work of Medbh McGuckian, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy, the anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing. It shows important connections between the work of women poets and shows how - throughout past 100 years - they have developed strategies for engaging with a male-dominated tradition. "Modern Women Poets" allows the reader to trace women's negotiations with one another's work, as well as to reflect more generally on the politics of women's engagement with history, nature, politics, motherhood, science, religion, the body, sexuality, identity, death, love, and poetry itself.

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.

Intended to be read from beginning to end, Quiver is a book-length poem - a murder-mystery - which explores the nature of creativity. Fay Thomas, a poet with writer's block, becomes a murder suspect after she stumbles over the body of her husband's former lover, Mara, as she runs one morning in a local cemetery. Set in a year when Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday coincide with Chinese New Year celebrations for the Year of the Horse, Fay slowly begins to find her own voice as her poems become interspersed with the narrative. With the help of her friend Erica, trailed by a bewildered policeman and haunted by a ghostly figure, she tracks the killer through the docklands of Liverpool, before the final dramatic showdown in Chinatown."Deryn Rees-Jones proves herself to be a fascinating and compelling poet.. There are two main strengths to this poetry, which endlessly repays attention by providing fresh nuances of seeing: the ability of Deryn Rees-Jones to manage a wide emotional range, and her fluidity of meaning." Critical Quarterly"Rees-Jones is a joy to read because she stands for life"OrbisDeryn 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.

Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry 2012.Shortlisted for the 2013 Wales Book of the Year.Poetry Book Society Recommendation.In her new collection, Deryn Rees-Jones presents poems of intense lyricism in the face of loss, including an extended elegy to her late husband, the poet and critic Michael Murphy. Above all, though, this is poetry that celebrates the life that surrounds us: from Roethkean 'small things' like birds, stones, feathers, flowers, eggs and truffles, to poems of the body, 'the blue heartstopping pulse at the wrist', and the transformative qualities of love."A powerful, deeply moving collection whose searching, often elegiac, sometimes joyous poems remind us that grief is not an end, but another beginning, and that loss drives us, inexorably, to a new kind of finding."John Burnside"The care and cares of this book, its heartbroken, exacting integrity, mark an important development in her work, enhancing its technical and emotional strength, range and versatility."Ian Duhig"This is a collection haunted by images of darkness. Yet the dark is also a source of creativity, of light... This book reminds us that to live (to survive) is itself a creative endeavour, a struggle against formlessness, which requires 'heart' and 'love'. These poems are a moving record of such experience, and a complex work of art."Tom Sperlinger, Huffington Post UK"One of the strongest forces in contemporary Welsh poetry." TLS"A refreshing abundance of energy... vividly sensory, [her work] teems with sharp images and inventive approaches." Poetry ReviewDeryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool with family links to North Wales, where she later studied. The Memory Tray (Seren, 1995) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her other works are Signs Round a Dead Body (Seren, 1998) and Quiver (Seren, 2004), and a critical book, Consorting with Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005), alongside her accompanying anthology Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005). In 2004 she was named as one of Mslexia's 'top ten' women poets of the decade, and in 2010 she won a Cholmondeley Award. Her work can be heard at the Poetry Archive. She currently teaches literature at the University of Liverpool.