{"id":4960,"date":"2015-06-22T10:40:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T09:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4960"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:50:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:50:05","slug":"rebecca-perry-beautybeauty-bloodaxe-books-9-95-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=4960","title":{"rendered":"Rebecca Perry, <em>Beauty\/Beauty<\/em> (Bloodaxe Books) \u00a39.95"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rebecca Perry has already garnered a lot of attention and a number of prizes in her short career so far.\u00a0 Her Seren Pamphlet <i>little armoured<\/i> was a PBS Pamphlet Choice and this book is a PBS recommendation.\u00a0 This book shows just why Perry has gained this recognition, but it is a book I admire rather than actually like.<\/p>\n<p>The address of the poems is very direct. The sentences are often quite short and compound.\u00a0 And at the beginnings of the sentences, the subjects of many of the verbs are either \u2018I\u2019 or \u2018she\u2019.\u00a0 The effect of these is quite centripetal;\u00a0 the poems pull inwards even where they move outwards, i.e. the world of the poem is constantly reiterated through the prism of the subject.\u00a0 In \u2018Soup Sister\u2019, for example, \u2018Last week I passed a tree\/that was exactly you in tree form,\/with a kind look and tiny sub-branches\/like your delicate wrists.\u2019 Of course, most poetry emerges from an authorising consciousness, and Rebecca\u00a0Perry makes a virtue of addressing the notion of herself as creator;\u00a0 placing herself and the artifice of her writing on the surface of the discourse.\u00a0 In the lines quoted above, Perry deals directly with the personification of the tree and the adoption of its characteristics to describe a friend.\u00a0 In \u2018Immortelle\u2019, Perry places \u2018the writer\u2019 at the entrance to the poem, \u2018At the time of writing a single apple costs 45p\/the writer is sleeping well\/\/at the time of writing\/the glasses in the cabinet have never been quieter\/\/.\u00a0 Clearly the writer cannot be \u2018sleeping\u2019 \u2018at the time of writing\u2019, but the reader gets the idea;\u00a0 the writer is in control and not in control. Such awareness of control extends to Perry\u2019s forms on the page, which range from dialogue in \u2018The Execution of Lady Jane Grey\u2019, to the Google accumulation of \u2018The Year I was Born: the day by day chronicle of events in the year of your birth\u2019, to the Anglo-Saxon-esque splitting of half-lines across the page.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere, Perry\u2019s technique is to accumulate images which present a sense of consciousness accreting experiences.\u00a0 In the final poem of the book, \u2018A Woman\u2019s Bones Are Purely Ornamental\u2019, Perry sets out a range of experiences accumulated by and amongst adolescent girls at an all-girls\u2019 school.\u00a0 Her juxtapositions are quirky and often very funny.\u00a0 They portray the attitudes of these girls in a way which seems completely realistic, \u2018We learnt tricks\/ like how to make our collarbones\/ as prominent as possible\/ and how to be interested\/ without being too interesting.\/\/ My friend\u2019s hands were beautiful,\/as were everyone else\u2019s.\/ I looked at them when they tapped pens in maths\/or painted PVA on their fingers.\/\u2026\/\/Our English teacher\/had a keen interest in serial killers\/and their motives.\/He mentioned this twice.\u2019 It is in poems such as these that the poems are moving and involving in the way other reviews have seen Perry\u2019s writing. <i>Beauty\/beauty <\/i>is a powerful, arresting debut;\u00a0 it will be very interesting to see where that power takes her next.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rebecca Perry has already garnered a lot of attention and a number of prizes in her short career so far.\u00a0 Her Seren Pamphlet little armoured was a PBS Pamphlet Choice and this book is a PBS recommendation.\u00a0 This book shows just why Perry has gained this recognition, but it is a book I admire rather [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - 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