Deryn Rees-Jones - Poetry and the Unsayable

What if there is no language to describe what the body experiences? In this episode, I talk to Deryn Rees-Jones about poetry and illness. Deryn shares what it feels like being a poet and tackling the complexity of life. With her personal experience of Long Covid, she talks about the challenge of how to use language to describe the precarious state of the body and finding ways to connect with the experience of others. In this amazing conversation, we go deep into topics of the everyday that are at the same time fundamental to human existence. Poets try to find a bridge through language so that experience can be articulated, understood, and shared. Moving beyond illness, we look at poetry and intersectional feminism, the climate crisis – and war. As a special treat, Deryn reads two of her poems: “The Cure” and “Drone” - both are immensely powerful and scarily topical.

Deryn Rees-Jones is a poet, an editor and a critic, as well as a professor of creative writing at the University of Liverpool. In 2004, Deryn was named as one of Mslexia’s ‘top ten’ women poets of the decade. In 2010 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. Deryn’s most recent book of poems, 'Erato', published in 2019, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and shortlisted for The Welsh Book of the Year and the TS Eliot Prize in 2019.

You can find her poem ‘The Cure’ here 

You can read ’14 Little Pieces on Love’ here 

‘Drone’ is one of the poem in ‘Erato’