Rees-Jones Hôtel Amour

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-911752-10-3
Verlag: Seren
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 112 Seiten

'This is simply extraordinary writing, laced with wonder and devastation...' Joanna Klink A sequel to her T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Erato, Deryn Rees-Jones' remarkable new collection sees her returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry's place in a hostile world. The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel's pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds. Playful, and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour's fierce and formidable exploration of 'the now' and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen, and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.

Deryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool, and educated in North Wales and London. She is the author of 7 collections of poetry including The Memory Tray (1995) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has twice been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize with her collections Burying the Wren (2012) and Erato (2019) which were also Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She edited the influential anthology Modern Women Poets for Bloodaxe. She has received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and was picked as one of the top ten women poets of the decade in Mslexia magazine. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool where she co-directs the Centre for New and International Writing, and edits the Pavilion Poetry Series for Liverpool University Press.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rees-Jones, Deryn

Leseproben

The hotel, which had once been one of the most famous brothels in Paris, occupied a discrete section of the quiet street. Here, if you listened,

you could hear the world in the quality of its movements. You could hear the loops and unravellings of the particular, coming together and then, washing away.

Here,

every wobble of the world in the moments of its creation, paused, and for a moment, she thought, here the sky had managed to

place itself, unknowingly, on a great hinge of between-ness: here was space, time, and, if you, too, paused to look up, here dreaming, here thinking, you could hear the clouds flirting

across the late summer sky; here you could see, later or earlier, say, the smear of

colour as pinks and oranges bled evening to night, night to dawn, here, &

L I S T E N!

In the nearby cafés, the rustle of pages turning in books and newspapers had become amplified, even the wingflaps of birds,

of eyelids opening and closing at the start

& end of the day, telescoped their sounds into new meaning.

(Words lifted themselves into the air as if they, too, were

birds     wings    leaf    flutterings.)

SSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH

The sign outside the hotel, up in the 9th, was made from pink neon.

In the boldest letters it spelled out

She had booked the room the previous week,

imagining how it would feel at that pinprick moment

in the future

when the afternoon darkened, and she found herself

sitting beside the window, watching the sign bleed its pink light into the room.

Bleedspill, fluorescent. Here. Elsewhere. Perhaps a little hum. She liked to imagine —

she liked to imagine the couples who had been there before her, the temporary residents, ghosting and overwriting themselves in

captions of feeling: the tenderness, the

moments of indulgence, joy, boredom, vulnerability.

Here, too, was a history: of sabotage,

harm, violence, fear, all working its way into the fabric of the building, gnawing, biting, sucking, swallowing, settling and edging in, at the door, the window….

Desire.

She flicked at the thought — stretchy, powdery, twitching — alive between her fingers.

She thought — imagining that moment now —

of the time in the Orangerie, when she had stood admiring a picture she knew very well, but which was new to her friend, who stood beside her. In it, everything was precise: the women were tending to a man who sat inert on the counterpane. There was a jug in the foreground. The detail at the back of the image on the painted wardrobe was a picture within a picture. It

reminded her of all that had happened. The ravaging, ugly, ordinary, a-synchronicity of illness and of death.

And yet, as the friend pointed out, with great deliberation,

...