Erato

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Casgliad o gerddi telynegol gan Deryn Rees-Jones, sy'n tynnu ar brofiadau bywyd. Holir cwestiynau am y gorffennol, y presennol a'r dyfodol, am lithriadau'r cof, am gamgymeriadau a dileadau, ac am y mannau y cyrhaeddwn wrth brosesu trawma.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Erato takes its title from the muse of lyric poetry. Drawing on brief, documentary-style narratives of her life, combined with lyric reinventions, Deryn 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.

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Deryn Rees-Jones works as a poet, editor and critic. She won an Eric Gregory award in 1993 and 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), Quiver (Seren, 2004), and a groundbreaking critical study of twentieth-century women's poetry, Consorting with Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005), published alongside Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005). She is Professor of Poetry at Liverpool University, and editor of the poetry series for Pavilion Press (Liverpool University Press).

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

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.