Output details

Burying the Wren

The book originated in a pamphlet Falls & Finds (2008), in connection with which an AHRC small grant enabled research at the Natural History Museum. I have become increasingly interested in the small things of the natural world: fossils, meteorites, slugs, truffles, and the ways in which we make things mean in poetry. That pamphlet included commissioned poems involving collaborative interdisciplinary work (with Professor Richard Fortey: ’Trilobite’) and astronomer (Professor Ian Morison: ‘A Dream of Constellations’). Burying the Wren contains two eponymous poems. The first was directly written as a result of an AHRC-funded commission for Poetry Beyond Text in 2010 (for a gloss on the origins of the poem see http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/maher-rees-jones.html) to collaborate with the Irish artist Alice Maher (www.alicemaher.com). Primarily the project prompted me to think more about the relationship between words and things, and made an important contribution to the book’s idea about saying and not saying, presence and absence, and translating feelings into words. Readings of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy have become increasingly important to my thinking, not only for this book, but in more traditional academic work (e.g., a forthcoming essay on Jorie Graham and ekphrasis). Poems written subsequently to this commission also responded to art works (for example, the first poem in the book, ‘Three Glances at a Field of Poppies’ ; and the poem sequence ‘Dogwoman’, which directly references the pictures of Paula Rego). More generally, the volume stems from ten years intensive reading in psychoanalytic literature and philosophy, and latterly in the field of death and dying. I have regularly attended the University of Liverpool’s Living with Dying Network. The poems also emerge directly out of my own research on contemporary women’s poetry (Consorting with Angels: Modern Women Poets, 2005) and the problematizing of constructions of women poets' use of the lyric ‘I’.