Burying the Wren

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 Review

Deryn 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.