Stone Fruit by Rebecca Perry

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 Recommendation. 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, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

‘In poetry... I also loved the brilliantly tender STONE FRUIT by Rebecca Perry.’ – Rebecca Tamás, The White Review (Books of the Year, 2021)

'Divided into three sections that uncannily echo one another, Stone Fruit, the follow-up to her debut Beauty/Beauty (2015), interrogates the limits of the body and the poet’sdifficulty in articulating those limits.' - Maya C. Popa, Times Literary Supplement

‘… Stone Fruit is an accumulation. Perry’s clean, sometimes conversational lines build into a mesmerising intensity.’ – Alycia Pirmohamed, The Poetry Review

‘With the mastery of a trampolinist or the grace of a dragonfly these poems land delicately at the centre of one thought only to leap up again and take us somewhere else entirely. This makes for intriguing reading that goes deeper with each rereading.’ – Mary Mulholland, The Alchemy Spoon, on Stone Fruit

'An unusual book, Stone Fruit is lyrical, profoundly moving, and incredibly poignant. The poems work together as a testament to the power of reflection, the delicate balance of poetry and essay lending a playful yet surreal quality to the collection.' – Alison King, The School Librarian

 

Praise for Beauty/Beauty

'We were impressed by the book's refreshing ambition and sophistication, its liveliness and bounce, and how rewarding the poems were as we read and re-read them.' – Judges Professor Deryn Rees-Jones, Professor Karen Leeder and John McAuliffe, The 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize

‘…some of the most interesting names on the shortlist [for the T S Eliot Prize 2015] are the newest ones: Rebecca Perry and Sarah Howe have both been nominated for their debut collections. Perry’s Beauty/Beauty is a book of reflection and symmetry, with several of the poems spaced to look like mirror images of each other. Interested in the ways that languages express love, she is on a quest to view emotion from all possible angles.’ – Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

‘In Beauty/Beauty, she offers female perspectives with openness and vulnerability, in both her themes and experiments with form, to find new ways of writing the feminine. Non-linear images are subverted by shattered narratives, in poems written "from the nose / out, like a painting". Her gaze is not limited to personal experience. It is a triumph of imagination that she is able to empathise with other forms of oppression. She captures the sadness of seas and writes a love poem to a stegosaurus, whose mouth "holds more wonder than a sky full of stars".’ – Pascale Petit, chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges

‘All of the poems in this debut, shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, search for the impossible-to-find… Perry has a chatty, sometimes superficial tone that belies her wry wisdom.’ – Evan Jones, The Guardian

‘’”I will be electric in the sweet world”, Rebecca Perry promises near the beginning of Beauty/Beauty, her first full-length collection. The promise is upheld from beginning to end of this arresting book.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement

'Richly self-reliant, these are poems for the girl-power generation. In a world where all is relative, subjective and ironic, their breakages and weaknesses and contradictions get as close to something like sincerity as most young poets dare.' – Kate Bingham, Poetry Review 

BLOODAXE BOOKS

 

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (1891-1938), the great modern Russian poet, essayist, and translator was born in Warsaw in 1891. In 1897, the family moved to Saint Petersburg. He received his formal education in the Tenishev School, in part at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, but never took an academic degree. He knew English, French, and German perfectly. 

The Kiss by Stephen Dunn

THE KISS
By Stephen Dunn

She pressed her lips to mind.
—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

What Goes On by Stephen Dunn

 

What Goes On

by Stephen Dunn 

After the affair and the moving out,
after the destructive revivifying passion,
we watched her life quiet

into a new one, her lover more and more
on its periphery. She spent many nights
alone, happy for the narcosis

of the television. When she got cancer
she kept it to herself until she couldn't
keep it from anyone. The chemo debilitated
and saved her, and one day

her husband asked her to come back —
his wife, who after all had only fallen
in love as anyone might
who hadn't been in love in a while —

and he held her, so different now,
so thin, her hair just partially
grown back. He held her like a new woman

and what she felt
felt almost as good as love had,
and each of them called it love
because precision didn't matter anymore.

And we who'd been part of it,
often rejoicing with one
and consoling the other,

we who had seen her truly alive
and then merely alive,
what could we do but revise
our phone book, our hearts,

offer a little toast to what goes on.

 

 

Story by Stephen Dunn

 

 

---

Story

by Stephen Dunn

 

A woman's taking her late-afternoon walk
on Chestnut where no sidewalk exists
and houses with gravel driveways
sit back among the pines. Only the house
with the vicious dog is close to the road.
An electric fence keeps him in check.
When she comes to that house, the woman
always crosses to the other side.

I'm the woman's husband. It's a problem
loving your protagonist too much.
Soon the dog is going to break through
that fence, teeth bared, and go for my wife.
She will be helpless. I'm out of town,
helpless too. Here comes the dog.
What kind of dog? A mad dog, a dog
like one of those teenagers who just loses it
on the playground, kills a teacher.

Something's going to happen that can't happen
in a good story: out of nowhere a car
comes and kills the dog. The dog flies
in the air, lands in a patch of delphiniums.
My wife is crying now. The woman who hit
the dog has gotten out of her car. She holds
both hands to her face. The woman who owns
the dog has run out of her house. Three women
crying in the street, each for different reasons.

All of this is so unlikely; it's as if
I've found myself in a country of pure fact,
miles from truth's more demanding realm.
When I listened to my wife's story on the phone
I knew I'd take it from her, tell it
every which way until it had an order
and a deceptive period at the end. That's what
I always do in the face of helplessness,
make some arrangements if I can.

Praise the odd, serendipitous world.
Nothing I'd be inclined to think of
would have stopped that dog.
Only the facts saved her.

 

 

Stephen Dunn. Photo: Andrea Dunn

Stephen Dunn: Influences

2001 Poetry winner Stephen Dunn died on June 24 at the age of 82. In 2016, he wrote about his influences in this reminiscence for the Pulitzer Prize centennial.

By Stephen Dunn

There are many beyond the three I will name — Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke. But individually and collectively they, I think, are the most important and lasting for me. In a nutshell, Frost for his strategies of composition and his quotidian yet philosophical investigations. Stevens for teaching me that, if the music was right, I could love poems I didn't understand. Roethke for his sensual playfulness, but finally for his lyrical meditations, and his phrasing; yes, Roethke most of all.

Beast, Book, Body Poem by Erica Jong

Beast, Book, Body Poem by Erica Jong

I was sick of being a woman,
sick of the pain,
the irrelevant detail of sex,
my own concavity
uselessly hungering
and emptier whenever it was filled,
and filled finally
by its own emptiness,
seeking the garden of solitude
instead of men.

The white bed
in the green garden--
I looked forward
to sleeping alone
the way some long
for a lover.

Even when you arrived,
I tried to beat you
away with my sadness,
my cynical seductions,
and my trick of
turning a slave
into a master.

And all because
you made
my fingertips ache
and my eyes cross
in passion
that did not know its own name.

Bear, beast, lover
of the book of my body,
you turned my pages
and discovered
what was there
to be written
on the other side.

And now
I am blank
for you,
a tabula rasa
ready to be printed
with letters
in an undiscovered language
by the great press
of our love.

After the Earthquaker by Erica Jong

Erica Jong / Photo by Christian Als Berlingske

AFTER THE EARTHQUAKER
by Erica Jong

After the first astounding rush,
after the weeks at the lake,
the crystal, the clouds, the water lapping the rocks,
the snow breaking under our boots like skin,
& the long mornings in bed. . .

After the tangos in the kitchen,
& our eyes fixed on each other at dinner,
as if we would eat with our lids,
as if we would swallow each other. . .

I find you still
here beside me in bed,
(while my pen scratches the pad
& your skin glows as you read)
& my whole life so mellowed & changed

that at times I cannot remember
the crimp in my heart that brought me to you,
the pain of a marriage like an old ache,
a husband like an arthritic knuckle.

Here, living with you,
love is still the only subject that matters.
I open to you like a flowering wound,
or a trough in the sea filled with dreaming fish,
or a steaming chasm of earth
split by a major quake.

You changed the topography.
Where valleys were,
there are now mountains.
Where deserts were,
there now are seas.

We rub each other,
but we do not wear away.

The sand gets finer
& our skins turn silk.

Meena Kandasamy / Top 10 love poems

Detail from the Stoclet Frieze by Gustav Klimt. Photograph: Album/Alamy

This article is more than 3 years old

Top 10 love poems

This article is more than 3 years old

For Valentine’s, or really any other day, here are some works by poets from Plath to Rilke that express some of our own most intimate feelings

Meena Kandasamy

Wed 8 Feb 2023 

Love makes poets out of all of us. The few who feel intimidated or embarrassed about writing out our love and longing often take recourse to sending lyric-heavy songs, or selections from a poem (like those included here), just to let the object of our affection know how they make us feel. As someone who is constantly moved by love and reckless enough to publicly write about it, I’ve also often relied on sending other people’s poems to reveal my own feelings.