Stone Fruit

by Rebecca Perry

A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise. Opening with a study of a girl in a miniature portrait, expanding into lyrical prose pieces and closing with a reflective long poem – part elegy and part reflective essay on competitive trampolining – the poems are united by a desire to pay absolute attention to both the material and inner world. The worlds within this collection appear to be teeming with life – crabs push through sand, wasps swarm on meat; and forms change – bones are replaced with metal, a human head transfigures into that of a muntjac – but there is nothing frantic in this shifting. The care taken in the poems to properly look, to focus on stillness and acts of interrogation, often gives the feeling that they are being viewed through glass, or placed in a frame. If this book could be said to have a central demand of the reader, it is to consider whether they will allow themselves to attend to the pain and joy of giving due reflection to what is happening in the world around us, in their lives and the lives of others. And what the cost of that is. Stone Fruit is Rebecca Perry’s second collection. Her first collection Beauty/Beauty won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published May 27, 2021

About the author

Rebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. Her first book-length collection, ‘Beauty/Beauty’ (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Her second book-length collection, ‘Stone Fruit’, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021.

Reviews

[Jeimy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Descriptive narrative poems. My favorite was “No rabbit” because it felt very tongue in cheek. I always tell my students that the speaker is not always the poet and this is a great way to illustrate that.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Falling into pain is a strange feeling.” Stone Fruit, the new, second poetry collection from Rebecca Perry, is a crisp, lyrical testament to ideas of the-self-through-time, of bodies in flux and/or peril; it leans more towards grief and nature than her first collection, Beauty/Beauty, both branching out from and building on some of her earlier images and themes. It was both rewarding and jolting to find Perry returning to the execution of Lady Jane Grey in ‘The execution was conducted in the open air’, so disparate from Perry’s earlier dialogue poem (one of my favourites) — and yet the two converse with one another, especially in their shared sense of overwhelming chaos. A tripartite collection, Stone Fruit begins with fourteen ‘beaches’ poems (first published as a pamphlet), brief and gorgeous poems full of striking rhythms and images: “i think the exact moment of the death of love is not when its head is cut off / and lifted to the crowd / it is a cold stone in the stomachs of the living”, and elsewhere “my chest a moonlit fridge / in a sleeping apartment / and a clock ticking”. The middle part of four freestanding poems leads on to the final part, uniting threads of nature, loss, self: ‘On trampolining’, a long-poem that circles over “bodily fears […] my perception of my brain as the saboteur / at the helm of my body”. Moving in and around “That little room of discomfort”, Perry offers up a tender reflection on embracing the past in the body.

[Kidlitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A DRC was provided by Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and edified review.

I never read as much poetry as I should; certainly not modern poetry. That's what I have younger more literate friends for, who tell me what I should be engaging with and take it so seriously that I feel I can never measure up in my responses. But Rebecca Perry - she gets her readers, and I think, I get her, a little. Her first gorgeous collection Beauty/Beauty made me think hard, especially as it drew on myth and children's tale to make the female experience feel not just personal to a cisgender, heteronormative middle-aged English literature lover, but to a wider readership. That is of course not to say it is self-consciously and loudly pitching her world view and experience out there with a great yawp, because Perry is a much more subtle, sophisticated writer than that. But her preoccupation with sustained imagery helps to ground her poems' reach - and how lovely that the presiding images in this collection are those titular stony fruit that bring such sweetness of taste but can break your teeth if you're not careful. And that trampolining part - one, brilliant, two, goofy and delightful, and three - so relatable it brings the kind of shocked identification from reader with writer that the best poetry can achieve. Kudos.

[Sophy H · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ermmmmmm. I'm thinking maybe certain types of poetry aren't really my thing.

I respect and see the appeal in this offering from Rebecca Perry but it just didn't do anything for me. I felt the whole end section on trampolining was more like a short story as opposed to poetry.

Anyway, not for me so I'm donating to the library in the hope that someone else may get some fulfillment and enjoyment out of this one.

[jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

i didn't really 'get' the first two sections and wasn't too taken by them, but loved the final section ('on trampolining'). really evocative, interesting, honest, funny in parts, and brought the whole collection together.

[✰matthew✰ · Rating 3 out of 5]

this collection was a mixed bag for me.

i didn’t dislike the first section but didn’t really understand it. i quite liked the middle section of individual poems. i really enjoyed the final section, on trampolining of which i’ve read the new full collection.

[Meg]

<3