Modern Women Poets

"Modern Women Poets" is the companion anthology to Deryn Rees-Jones's pioneering critical study, "Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets". While its selections illuminate and illustrate her essays, Deryn Rees-Jones's superb anthology works in its own right as the best possible introduction to a whole century of poetry by women. The anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing, while not isolating women's writing from its intersection with the work of male contemporaries. Tracing an arc from Charlotte Mew to Stevie Smith, from Sylvia Plath to the writing emerging from the Women's Movement, and to the more recent work of Medbh McGuckian, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy, the anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing. It shows important connections between the work of women poets and shows how - throughout past 100 years - they have developed strategies for engaging with a male-dominated tradition. "Modern Women Poets" allows the reader to trace women's negotiations with one another's work, as well as to reflect more generally on the politics of women's engagement with history, nature, politics, motherhood, science, religion, the body, sexuality, identity, death, love, and poetry itself.

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.