In ‘Burying the Wren’ Deryn Rees-Jones returns to familiar preoccupations but with a new clarity and maturity of vision. With intense lyricism she calls on the Roethkean ‘small things’ of the universe — truffles, slugs, trilobites, birds, stones, feathers, flowers, eggs — which, mysterious, and magical as well as ordinary — she sets up against loss. Her sequence of ‘Dogwoman’ poems, which draws on the work of artist Paula Rego, is a an extended elegy to her late husband, the poet and critic Michael Murphy. Above all these are poems of the body, “…the blue heartstopping pulse at the wrist”, which are alive to the world and the transformative qualities of love.

Shortlisted for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize