We can't wait to share our PBS Summer Recommendation Stone Fruit by Rebecca Perry with you!
Opening with a study of a girl in a miniature portrait, expanding into lyrical prose pieces and closing with a reflective long poem – part elegy and part reflective essay on competitive trampolining – the poems are united by a desire to 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 and acts of interrogation, often gives the feeling that they are being viewed through glass, or placed in a frame.
If this book could be said to have a central demand of the reader, it is to consider whether they will allow themselves to attend to the pain and joy of giving due reflection to what is happening in the world around us, in their lives and the lives of others. And what the cost of that is.
'We were impressed by the book's refreshing ambition and sophistication, its liveliness and bounce, and how rewarding the poems were as we read and re-read them.' - Judges Professor Deryn Rees-Jones, Professor Karen Leeder and John McAuliffe, The 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize
Image credit: Alice Mullen