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.
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you frown in your beautiful portrait, appearing dead even at the time, in a weak blue oval of enamel sky
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(@BloodaxeBooks, 22 June 2021, ebook, 72 pages, #ARC from the publisher via @edelweiss_squad)
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I really enjoyed the poet's first collection, Beauty/Beauty so I was looking forward to reading her new collection. I was very impressed with Stone Fruit. The collection had a similar feel to her first collection but in many ways was quite different. What struck me about the poems is the impressive use of imagery. Each poems is vivid, haunting and memorable. I got a bit lost reading this collection.
