Amy De’Ath

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Biographical note:  Amy De’Ath was born in Suffolk in 1985. She studied at the University of East Anglia and in Philadelphia, US, before moving to Australia and then to London. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals in the UK and US and will feature in the Salt Younger Poets 2011 anthology. She currently lives in London, and is Poet-in-Residence at the University of Surrey. This is her first book of poems.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718092
ISBN:  9781844718092
Author:  Amy De’Ath
Title:  Erec & Enide
Series:  Salt Modern Voices
Product class:  BF
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Dec-10
Extent:  52pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  4 mm
Weight:  78 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 6.5
Price:  USD 9.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Taking its title from Chretien De Troyes’ twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Erec & Enide moves through a vibrant, rich and playful mix of underhand lyric. A deceptive and light-footed vulnerability unexpectedly folds in on itself to throw up the most serious questions; then resolutely refuses to ‘make sense’ of things. These modern love poems wear their ideologically saturated state on their sleeve, and are all the more loving for that.

Main description:  With ‘a dewy idea peaking at what / Is this vector I caress? / What ran my legs brushing / alongside the linotype’, a deceptive and light-footed vulnerability unexpectedly folds in on itself to throw up the most serious questions; then resolutely refuses to ‘make sense’ of things. Erec & Enide is a bold and unashamedly intimate work that delights in the theatrical, communicative powers of language, and by turns gives way to a quiet sadness. Writing out of contemporary feminist revisions of lyric and epic forms, the poems set up an overtly feminised display which the reader then re-enacts to find meanings which do not ally and a feminism which does not conform to conventional modes of uplift. Taking its title from Chretien De Troyes’ twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Erec & Enide draws on Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail, the pastoral romanticism of John Clare, the feminist projects of Lisa Robertson and the essays of Kathy Acker as it moves through a vibrant, rich and playful mix of underhand lyric. These modern love poems wear their ideologically saturated state on their sleeve, and are all the more loving for that.

Table of contents:
Poetry for Boys
Dreamboat
Erec & Enide
Three in a Boat
593
Sonnet
A Note on Clarity
David
Five Exits
Since We’ve Lived Here
One Two
Lisa Jarnot’s Rabbit
Letter to John Clare
Lena at the Beach
Soliloquy for Living People
Jaguar
Notes

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Excerpt from book:  

Poetry for Boys

That the Joy will soon come and make you suffer!

i
Lay low in the words of the wood,
very subtle, not immune,
lay down in the snow and incline,
you are rest enough and dowry,
in the lay and the spook of an age,
very poor, still glamour,
still further than you think even
more, from the day duly swallow,
to the real green day in the dream,
very full, cracking bough,
the undoing publicity of meaning
all the whole black sky is feeling
the screwing over, resin delight
delightful residual meaning, still night.

ii
I’m a weeping boy and a centaur caving in.
Adventures, find me—I’m hard to come by.
In the days when mirrors were made of burnished silver
I stayed up late,
in the nearly beautiful night I stood not quite
in the shower plenty natural and the water washed into
the time of my skin.
I imagined how to answer the question of whether
psychic malady is a personal affair. Then I wrung
my hair and dye came out.

If I had the money to dip in being a boy,
if I was Anna O., & fallen into autism or
steeped in prelingual glimpses of Lena’s face,
I’d be living system: looped in my own elements.

A system closing talking only to itself.

Unpublished endorsement:  It is the world’s wild glare that provides the complex heart of Erec & Enide. With wisdom, uncommon wit, and precision, Amy De’Ath’s spirited first book unsettles all things to reveal that neither a language nor a body is a closed system. De’Ath’s is an inclusive imagination that meets the world with lyric intensity and irony—her poems invite us to feel: “stranger, it’s a hunger I’m looking for.”

Peter Gizzi

Unpublished endorsement:  Lyrical, local, literary, strong, domestic, delicate, sexy and epic, Amy De’Ath’s Erec & Enide also brings the modernity and speed of much recent North American poetry to these too-often inward-looking isles. “In the lay and spook of an age,” as she says, there is enough screwing over, glamour, residual meaning and resin delight in these poems to intrigue, excite and entertain even the gloomiest reader. De’Ath’s emphatic arrival on the British poetry scene is cause for both hope and celebration.

Tim Atkins

Unpublished endorsement:  While we oscillate between life and death, Amy De'Ath's poetry looks to the whir, the engines and the effects of such daily migrations. She ably slows us to take in and weigh the view, to ask how we construct the ‘publicity of meaning'. De'Ath's is a sensitive search; and while the unearthed may challenge (‘opened every cupboard looking for the nature of it’), the unanswerable space is enriching.

Erec & Enide is fiery and soft. Let it carry you on wings of seductive metrics and lyric playfulness, below and between timeless narratives.

Amy King