Consorting with Angels

In this pioneering critical study, Deryn Rees-Jones discusses the work of some of the major women poets of the last hundred years, showing how they have explored what it has meant to be a woman poet writing in a male-dominated poetic tradition. Beginning with Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, she shows how an older generation resisted easy categorisation by forging highly individual aesthetics and self-presentation. For Edith Sitwell, the woman poet was to be ‘as eloquent as a peacock’. Stevie Smith compared poetry to ‘a strong explosion in the sky’ but did not consider gender to be an important factor. Sylvia Plath, who admired the work of both these poets, wanted to write in a way which was ‘not quailing and whining’ but to produce ‘working, sweating, heaving poems born out the way words should be said.’ Anne Sexton, in her poem ‘Consorting with Angels’, writes that she is ‘tired of the gender of things’ ‘not a woman anymore,/ not one thing or the other’. But despite their brilliance, their perceived eccentricity – along with the suicides of Plath and Sexton – made these major figures difficult acts to follow. Deryn Rees-Jones then considers the poetry written in their wake, with essays covering poets such as Moniza Alvi, Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Lavinia Greenlaw, Selima Hill, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Medbh McGuckian, Alice Oswald and Jo Shapcott. While these women all have very different writing styles, Rees-Jones argues that common strategies emerge which link them to their poetic predecessors, showing how they have developed an aesthetic which allows them to explore their femininity. Taking account of the importance to these women of the work of their male contemporaries, her incisive essays open up new perspectives on the poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries. Deryn Rees-Jones’s companion anthology Modern Women Poets is published at the same time as Consorting with Angels.

Deryn Rees-Jones was born in Liverpool with family links to North Wales, where she later studied. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1993 and The Memory Tray (Seren, 1995) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her other works include Signs Round a Dead Body (Seren, 1998), Quiver (Seren, 2004), and a groundbreaking critical study of twentieth-century women’s poetry, Consorting with Angels (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), which was published alongside her accompanying anthology Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). In 2004 she was named as one of Mslexia’s ‘top ten’ women poets of the decade, as well as being chosen as one of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation poets. In 2010 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Burying the Wren was published in 2012; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Times Literary Supplement book of the year. A regular collaborator with contemporary artists, her most recent titles are And You, Helen (Seren, 2014), a book and animated poem made with the artist Charlotte Hodes about the wife and widow of the poet Edward Thomas, What It's LIke to be Alive: Selected Poems (Seren, 2016), and a new collection, Erato (Seren, 2019). She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool, and is the editor of the Pavilion Poetry series for Liverpool University Press.