The Memory Tray

by Deryn Rees-Jones

Deryn Rees-Jones' lively debut collection explores issues of gender and identity, memory and desire, through witty juxtapositions of character, plot and theme. Formative poems resound with magical imagery, as in "The Great Mutando" and recapture the dream-states of childhood where "Grandma in the Garden" appears, not as a homely matriarch, but as a terrifying figure with 'one wild Modigliani eye hooking the clouds'. Other poems focus on love from initial erotic frisson to break up and 'the strange geographies of hurt'. Also included are ambitious, various monologues like "Lovesong to Captain James T. Kirk" and the provocative "Metamorphoses" featuring a transvestite who dreams of being Marilyn Monroe.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

Rees-Jones is an Anglo-Welsh poet and professor of poetry at the University of Liverpool. She has a PhD from Birkbeck where she studied women poets. She has published four volumes of poetry. 'Burying the Wren' was a TLS Book of the Year and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Reviews

[Mattea Gernentz]

Summer

Is a lazy god, and all promises.
He says he will never leave,
Was a long time coming
With swallows in the air —
Petulant, weeping.

Waking early one morning
I watch him from the bedroom window
Barefoot on the wet grass,
Stalking the garden and beside himself
With all the brilliant flowers.

With soft, dry hands he soothes their heavy heads.
My children's books, too,
That were carelessly left on the lawn all night,

Unread and ruined by the rain (20).

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very lovely poems.