Stone Fruit

By Rebecca Perry

A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry's Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise. 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. Stone Fruit is Rebecca Perry’s second collection, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendtion. Her first collection Beauty/Beauty won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: May 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781780375694

Rebecca Perry

Rebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. She graduated from Manchester’s Centre for New Writing in 2008 and lives in London. She has published several pamphlets, including little armoured (Seren, 2012), which won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; cleanliness of rooms and walls (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2017); insect & lilac (2019), co-authored with Amy Key from a joint residency at Halsway Manor (the National Centre for Folk Arts); and beaches (Offord Road Press, 2019). Her first book-length collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Her second book-length collection, Stone Fruit, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, is published by Bloodaxe in 2021.

Book preview

REBECCA PERRY

STONE FRUIT

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

A collection of three distinct parts, the poems in Rebecca Perry’s Stone Fruit nonetheless speak across their many common preoccupations: memory, grief, the fallibility of the physical form, our connection to and place in the world, natural and otherwise.

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.

Stone Fruit is Rebecca Perry’s second collection. Her first collection Beauty/Beauty won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize.

Cover art: Hyacinth with Four Cherries, a Lizard and an Artichoke

by Giovanna Garzoni (1600-70)

Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi, Inv.GDSU, Ornato Opera 2147. © Su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attivita culturali e per il Turis

REBECCA PERRY

Stone Fruit

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks to Oxford Poetry, Pain, PN Review, Poetry London, Poetry Spotlight, Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry (Ignota), The Poetry Review, The Rialto and The Scores where these poems, or earlier versions of them, were published. The first section of this book was published as a pamphlet, beaches, with Offord Road Books in 2019.

Thanks and love to Amy Key, Martha Sprackland, Rebecca Tamás and Jane Yeh for friendship, editorial support and insights. I am grateful always to my family and Ross for everything, and to my friends for being my friends.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

beaches (1)

beaches (2)

beaches (3)

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