Deryn Rees-Jones at Open Eye Gallery

For the seventh Matt Simpson Memorial Reading, hosted by Liverpool Poetry Space (LiPS), Deryn Rees-Jones will be reading from her new collection, Hôtel Amour.

The new collection came out in July with Seren Books and is a sequel to Deryn Rees-Jones’s TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted Erato. It was described by The Telegraph as “extraordinary in its formal conception and emotional accuracy” and sees the poet returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world.

Here’s a bit from the publisher: “The book begins with a woman checking into Hôtel Amour, a space both real and imagined, in the heart of Paris. This is a hallucinatory city where surreal symbols loom large: the hotel’s pink neon sign, elephants, doubles, and lost pairings. A bloody heart lies in the street, books concertina into song, and everywhere is the ever-present noise of birds. Playful, and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form, creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time. Hôtel Amour’s fierce and formidable exploration of ‘the now’ and its many ghostly literary pasts, is the work of a poet at the height of her powers as she asks us to listen, and explore our human capacity for transformation and for hope.”

Deryn Rees-Jones is Professor of Poetry at the University of Liverpool and editor of the Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press). The Memory Tray (Seren Books, 1995) was shortlisted for a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She has since written Signs Round A Dead Body (Seren Books, 1998), Quiver (Seren Books, 2004), Consorting With Angels (Bloodaxe, 2005), Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005) and And You, Helen (Seren Books, 2014), a meditation on Helen and Edward Thomas, illustrated by Charlotte Hodes, and What It’s Like to be Alive: Selected Poems (Seren, 2016), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. In addition, her collection Burying the Wren was on the 2012 TS Eliot Prize shortlist, and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, and 2019’s Erato was again shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is also the author of Paula Rego: The Art of Story (Thames & Hudson 2019) and the lyric essay ‘Fires’ (Shoestring, 2019). In 2010 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors and in 2024 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

If you can’t make it to Liverpool, you can catch Deryn Rees-Jones reading at Poets & Players in Manchester on 27 September.

The Matt Simpson Memorial Reading was established by Dr Eleanor Rees at Liverpool Hope University, working with The Windows Project. Previous readings were by George Szirtes (2018), Liz Berry (2019), Helen Mort (2021, online), Kayo Chingonyi (2022), Seán Hewitt (2023) and Janette Ayachi (2024).

Matt Simpson was an English poet, literary critic, mentor and Senior Lecturer at Liverpool Hope University. He published six full collections of poetry, literary criticism and essays and work for children. Born in Bootle in 1936 to a working-class family with a long seafaring tradition, he was educated at Bootle Grammar School and read English at Cambridge, and he died in 2009.

LiPS is an independent organisation whose aim is to offer space for poetry to be shared and experienced around Liverpool City Region, and in 2025 has held events with the poets CAConrad, Eleanor Rees, Jay Farley and Chris McCabe. LiPS also co-hosted the final leg of this year’s annual European Poetry Festival, also at Open Eye Gallery.