#deryn rees-jones

[contremineur]

I remembered when my daughter was only two how, we had flown from right to left across the world, and how in the dark, looking down from the plane windows, all we could see beneath us were the blazing fires, oil on water, as we crossed the Gulf.

Deryn Rees-Jones, from Eyes to the right, nose to the left

text and image from here and here respectively

[poem-today]

A Favourite Deryn Rees-Jones Poem

What It’s Like To Be Alive

after Django Bates

I remember the nights, and the sounds of the nights, and the moon and the clouds, then the clear sky

and the stars and the angels on the rye, and I remember the way we knelt on the bed, how the bedclothes

were a tide, and the sunlight was a tide, and how everything pulled, and I remember the trains, leaving and arriving, and I remember the tears, your tears, and my tears

and how we were children, not lovers, how the angels cried,

and I remember your face and you coming in my hands, and the clouds, and the stars, and how, for a moment, with our eyes tight closed how the planet lurched

and the angels smiled, and I remember how I did not know if this was grief or love,

this hot pool, and the sounds, and then nothing.

A watermark held up to the light. A boat rowed off the edge of the world.

Deryn Rees-Jones

http://derynrees-jones.co.uk

[violettesiren]

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

Waking early one morning I watch him from the bedroom window Barefoot on the 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.

Summer by Deryn Rees-Jones

[saltwaterandstars]

JOMP BPC - 8th July - The Sky

(And an apple tree!)

[seaanimalonland]

After You Died | Deryn Rees-Jones

The night would not give in to me – or something inside me would not yield. The great harness of love I was wearing stiffened in my shoulders, was held like a bit between my teeth.                       Last night I woke and the moon was there, her old romance of self-reliance and inconstancy. And though my children in their turn woke up to frantic dreams, were held,

brought back to bed, she was there, her face full with a fierce singing.

And the dark again became a place of sleep, a wild thing cohabiting.

via @seanehewitt

[bookjotter6865]

WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020: Shortlist Announced

WALES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020: Shortlist Announced

Hosted by Literature Wales

The shortlist for the Wales Book of the Year 2020 – which is Wales’ national book prize celebrating the nation’s outstanding literary talent from across various genres in both English and Welsh – was revealed on BBC Radio Wales’ Gareth Lewis programme on 1st July.

The winners will be announced on the BBC Radio Wales Arts Showon Friday 31st July from 18:00 hrs BST. The…

View On WordPress

[violettesiren]

Some days it is simple, the way outside turns inner- the fall towards light, the pull of the weather. This is love’s work –

the way I’ve learnt again to slip inside my dreams: to hold my face up to the rain, move from one world to another.

Persephone by Deryn Rees-Jones

[violettesiren]

Let’s start with the stag. No hedging, no prevarication, no semiotics or white lies. Let’s start, simply, with this tale of transformation. Artemis and Actaeon. As good as any other. I’ll begin by simply asking you, Imagine this. The weight of the antlers, the stagginess of the moulting coat, the staggy eyes with their bushy lashes, the intimacy of the moment when for the first time a man sees the body of a woman. And then this man becomes a stag. Let’s start with the Dewars poster on the wall, his proud glance, let’s start with the head at the feet of the huntsman, the stag’s blood, his rite of passage daubed on his skin as if accidents with a razor – the cheek torn, cotton-woolly kind – were all it took to make a man of him. Let’s start with what he once was that day as he peeked and pried, a young man, bold as brass, in those days when seeing was doing, the eucalyptus whispering as this woman undresses who is also a god. And while he watches her, as water somehow possesses her, rids the privacy of her well-formed body, then gives itself up like the body gives up perfume, sweat, revealing her, as she emerges, clavicle, breast-bone, the blue vein at her child-free nipple, the thatch of hair that covers the pubis: Artemis, single-minded, casting about red-cheeked, groping for her bow and arrow refusing to be naked for this man. That’s when the story starts, with the divine inviolate, that’s where the story starts in the terrible comedy of shame. And when we ask how desire runs upwards on the spine’s ladder, to the nape, and down again on that central point between labia and coccyx, that private space the huntsman longed for, perhaps wanted to bring between thumb and forefingers to know in himself interior joy, we must ask then why desire that runs between humans and gods is always ill-fated, as our story now hangs on a breath as we pin back our ears, cut the umbilicus, its glistening thread . . . Take Semele, consumed by fire in the face of Zeus, Dionysis her son left to mature in the incubator of his father’s thigh, a scrawny cry as he was born, wriggling from his tight papoose; or that bright nymph Echo, known for her poetry, heartbreaking songs, damned by Hera till her bones turned to stone and her voice a whisper; Narcissus her lover condemned to keep looking transformed to a lonesome waterside flower. But let’s shift back our focus to Actaeon / Artemis, the goddess’s companion who had also spotted our peeping Tom, who longed to push her breasts against his back, rub peplon and chiton against that chest, for whom chastity is a spiritual heist, who covets most the watermark streaks, stretchmarks on a mother’s skin, who in Titian’s painting failed again under the skull of a stag. Faith, let’s call her that, who wanted nothing more than the spillage of silver, who as she watched him watching them as they undressed, slipped off her dress, this time without caution, holding her arms above her head, prolonging the moment of her nudity, airing the flex and tautness of her limbs, the narrow triangle of her unmarked back, the downy base of that fragile neck. Let’s imagine what would have happened had Artemis not spotted him. For here it was, dark as a plum, the genesis of a ruined moment, the intoxication of a bird’s first flight, the rumination of the world, a man aspiring to see the goddess. And wanting what? To feel her goodness not as a violation, and a woman, not a goddess, but infused with her goodness, wanting to find a part of herself in this man as she felt his body as a line of pleasure: it is done, here it is, we have done it, it is done. For what she wanted was belief in a self. What she wanted was to look at the goddess, to see something there of herself, too; what she wanted was to look at the man without fear or shame with an image of herself from which to begin. But that bronzed creature, which is where, in a fashion, we began, was no answer, as she peered into the bathing pool, seeing the stag by her own face, pregnant now, though she doesn’t know it, and the stag ripped apart by the hounds . . . Those hounds! Imagined now as what? An ever-changing line of mothers, daughters, long-lived women? Antigone and Clytemnestra, Penelope and Joan. The names might go on, being all things and nothing, finding within themselves routes to becoming: lovers of women, lovers of men. Names trip off the tongue: Millicent, Sylvia, Christabel, Emily, Angel Virginia, No-nonsense Simone, Glorious Gloria, Unblushing Germaine; Fierce Luce, Brave Julia, la belle Hélène. They burn like a catechism, are worthy of praise. Here’s hound Catherine, now, with her crown of thorns, Little Saint Bride with her cow-print jacket, Agnes the Borzoi, the Windhound Poor Clare. Here’s Aphra, Felicia, Adelaide, Christina, so many Elizabeths they can’t all be named . . . But let us return now to Faith, the mother perhaps of all invention, tears pouring from her virgin cheeks, still hoping to find herself, anywhere, anyhow, witness to the spillage of blood, as Actaeon, whom she has loved, or the idea of him, who has made her unchaste, is disembowelled, whose brave head, as she sees it, lies ludicrous on the sandy floor. She would light up the forest with candles, if she could, wear his head like a headdress of candles, so that wax and blood was intermingled, would drip to her shoulders in rosy tears. And yet, with her cold stare, now, Artemis at her shaking side, patron of childbirth and chastity, the double-voiced nature of her own creation, with a miraculous stirring divorced from her body scratches out words with a stick on the floor. And the empty-eyed sky looks down, regardless, as Faith dresses, rolls back her sleeves, her eyes more knowing than she is telling as she holds up a mirror to the goddess, looks at herself, behind her, through it, and on.

Quiver by Deryn Rees-Jones