Consorting with Angels

Deryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool with family links to North Wales, where she later studied. 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 include 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 Books, 2005), which was published alongside her accompanying anthology Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). In 2004 she was named as one of Mslexia's 'top ten' women poets of the decade, as well as being chosen as one of the Poetry Book Society's Next Generation poets. In 2010 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Burying the Wren was published in 2012; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year. A regular collaborator with contemporary artists, her most recent titles are And You, Helen (Seren, 2014), a book and animated poem made with the artist Charlotte Hodes about the wife and widow of the poet Edward Thomas, What It's LIke to be Alive: Selected Poems (Seren, 2016), and a new collection, Erato (Seren, 2019). She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool, and is the editor of the Pavilion Poetry series for Liverpool University Press.

Until recently, women's poetry has been tragically underappreciated. This study, argues that poetic traditions must be radically rethought in light of the formal and thematic experimentation of three generations of women poets. Rees-Jones establishes a lineage of women poets, from the more well-known work of Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Jennings, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, to the contemporary poets such as Gwyneth Lewis, Carol Ann Duffy, Selima Hill, and Medbh McGuckian, exemplifying women's poetry in Britain and America over the past century.