The memory tray

Deryn Rees-Jones' lively debut collection explores issues of gender and identity, memory and desire, through witty juxtapositions of character, plot and theme. Formative poems resound with magical imagery, as in "The Great Mutando" and recapture the dream-states of childhood where "Grandma in the Garden" appears, not as a homely matriarch, but as a terrifying figure with 'one wild Modigliani eye hooking the clouds'. Other poems focus on love from initial erotic frisson to break up and 'the strange geographies of hurt'. Also included are ambitious, various monologues like "Lovesong to Captain James T. Kirk" and the provocative "Metamorphoses" featuring a transvestite who dreams of being Marilyn Monroe.