A collection of three distinct parts, our Summer Recommendation Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit is united by memory, grief and our connection to the world. Opening with a study of a girl in a miniature portrait and closing with a reflective long poem on competitive trampolining – these poems 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, often gives the feeling that they are being viewed through glass, or placed in a frame. This book demands that the reader gives due reflection to what is happening in the world around us and considers what the cost of that is.
Rebecca Perry's first collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), was 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. She has published several pamphlets, including little armoured (Seren, 2012), which won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; insect & lilac (2019), co-authored with Amy Key from a joint residency at The National Centre for Folk Arts; and beaches (Offord Road Press, 2019).
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