Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Named after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones questions the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, asks one poem, between a sigh and a song? Erato's themes are manifold but focus especially on personal loss, desire and recovery, in the context of a world in which wars and displacement of people has become a terrifying norm.

In its narrative of transformations, the invocation of Erato also carries with it a sense of errata and erasure. As stories and ideas are repeated, and recurring imagery – of fires, bees, birds – is continually reframed, we are asked to replay, rethink, rename. How do we step out from the 'perpetual loop' of trauma? And how do we process painful change? Bewilderment by ongoing historical tragedy is countered by the Rees-Jones's close attention to immediate or remembered experience, and the importance of the body, whether lying awake with a sleepless child, felling a backyard tree, walking the encampments of refugees in Paris, or the dreamlike conversation she has with the radio about bombs and drones.

Erato includes elegies for family members and close friends, including an impressive and moving long poem 'I.M.', and the autobiographical 'Caprice' in which Rees-Jones explores with musical abandon 'the scribble-mess' of self, and the 'grainy, atomized emotion coursing through in middle age'.