Stone Fruit

Rebecca Perry

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781780375687
• eBook ISBN: 9781780375694
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 Recommendtion. 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.

11

beaches (1)

you frown in your beautiful portrait,

appearing dead even at the time,

in a weak blue oval of enamel sky.

what’s wrong, my little peach?

tonight a wolf’s eyes will glow

violet in a forest you’ll never see

in a place you can’t know. is that it?

and, somewhere, is a whole beach

made of glass pebbles you will never

lie down on, nor will your skin reflect

its blue, green, white, and burn.

12

beaches (2)

the house is large and dark

with narrow rooms

i woke today unable to move my arms

and called for him

the house is a honeycomb

the truth is i feel robbed

of a sweetness laboured hard for

the house behaves

like a person hiding in a cupboard

with held breath

i hate for the inanimate

to get the better of me

today i walked the length of the beach

to the caves

and thought of him for some time

pathetic girl

how colourless a beach in the rain

my imagination my rage

quiet and unlike any other

said to him

you know a cave had another form

before the water came

13

beaches (3)

a sand timer holds enough sand

to last the duration of one human life

the oldest sand was already ancient

when the first amphibian crawled onto the beach

the term egg timer came to prominence

only with the need for cooked egg perfection

sand of three transformative minutes

a princess is trapped inside the sand timer

swallowing the contents

a beach filling her mouth

the princess likes her eggs scrambled

with chives and black pepper

she swallows the sand and thinks about that

traditionally hourglass sand wasn’t sand

an hourglass is also a body

an hourglass body is specifically designed

for you to want to put your hands

around the smallest middle part

traditionally the material was

powdered marble and burnt eggshell

the princess fits in the sand timer so nicely

like a chick inside an egg

so much swallowing done

her stomach has become a beach

the yellow sphere in her centre

pouring through her smallest middle part

14

beaches (4)

the sky fell

in the manner of an...

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• beaches (1)
• beaches (2)
• beaches (3)
• beaches (4)
• beaches (5)
• beaches (6)
• beaches (7)
• beaches (8)
• beaches (9)
• beaches (10)
• beaches (11)
• beaches (12)
• beaches (13)
• beaches (14)
• The execution was conducted in the open air
• Lilac crest
• No rabbit
• Apples are ¼ air
• On trampolining
• About the Author
• Copyright