Fathom

The glowing, painterly poems of Jenny Lewis's first collection take soundings in the depths: of the layers of the pasts that create a life, of the sources of self and creativity, of the structures beneath the surface. It is a region of loss and of recovery, the realm where memories are stored and poetry is made. Ghosts appear. An unknown father, the 'young South Wales Borderer' who died when Lewis was a few months old, bequeaths an irrecoverable sense of incompleteness to his child. Poems about being sent away to a Masonic school, aged seven, reflect the shadow that loss casts, while a later sequence suggests how the missing pieces may be recovered from the depths. Fathom is an intense and textured collection that leads the reader from surfaces to the heart of things. In the end is a sense of affirmation, where self is made whole.

Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She was educated at the Royal Masonic School (Weybridge and Rickmansworth) and then at the Ruskin School of Art and, later, St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She gained an MPhil in Poetry from the University of South Wales and a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, London University where her dissertation was 'Translating epic poetry from an unfamiliar language.' Jenny has had seven plays and poetry cycles performed with music and dance at major UK theatres including the Royal Festival Hall and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford where she was a Core Writing Tutor for 20 years, working mainly with the flagship Pegasus Youth Theatre for which she wrote After Gilgamesh (2012) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan Al-Sayegh, Journeys to Freedom: A Retelling of the 1001 Arabian Nights (2015). Jenny has published four collections including Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014) and Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018) which was a New Statesman Book of the Year, a LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet’s first ever audiobook. Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh which are part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘ Writing Mesopotamia’ project aimed at building bridges between English and Arabic-speaking communities. The project included collaborations with artists, musicians and film-makers; seminars and readings at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the British Museum and the Iraqi Embassy; and a song, ‘Anthem for Gilgamesh’ which has had over 100,000 hits on YouTube and Arab websites. Let me tell you what I saw, Jenny’s translation (with others) of extracts from Adnan’s work, was published by Seren in 2020.Jenny’s first poetry book, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia, 2002) was made into an opera, with music by Gennadyi Shiroglazov, performed in English by the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in 2017 and in Russian for International Women’s Day 2023, by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.Jenny’s poems, reviews and articles have been published by leading journals, including The Cork Literary Review, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Salzburg Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review and World Literature Today. Jenny’s album of her 1960’s songs, including ‘Seventeen Pink Sugar Elephants’ (co-written and arranged by Vashti Bunyan), is forthcoming in 2024.