Hôtel Amour

Deryn Rees-Jones, published by Seren Books

In experiencing “emotional time-travel,” we are confronted with sensations, feelings, and emotions seemingly at random. Poetry often feels like an effort at containing such untethered emotions. Anchoring them to a story or pressing them into a shape, that they might be made manageable. Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones metabolises phenomena which are fundamentally difficult to contain and which can make themselves felt at any moment: a pandemic, a war, loss, love.

The book plays with compression and spaciousness. Opening with vast swathes of white space, it condenses down into twenty-four sonnets (plus a twenty-fifth, hidden towards the end), then returns to openness. The particularities of erotically-charged interiors exist beneath broad skies where you can “hear the clouds flirting”. Motifs, along with memories, loop and reappear. Angels, elephants, neon pink text... what does a poet do with such things, when dizzy with loss or sickness or bewilderment? They make meaning, as an act of containment.

“How easily everything suggested itself to her”. For a book full of loss, there is also a lot of joy. Children rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream;girls tossing paper cups above the metro’s air vents; and then, “suddenly a lime green bike propped up beside the métro sign was nothing short of beautiful.”

These lively images are not allowed to glow for too long. They collapse into memories, then memories collapse into the present moment, as though the speaker has lost when she is. Our speaker sometimes feels like a spectre, taking selfies and looking in mirrors as though to tether herself to the present. One of the most intimate relationships described is of the virus and her heart: being so desirous of its own survival, covid wants her to survive too. And knowing her heart to have broken “with a dull internal thud” she wonders, “[w]ho, then, but the virus, could have felt that, inhabiting it, and her, cell by cell?”

We readers float through both breathless grief and airy joy, following our protagonist until she ends up moving with “new rhythm […] towards the departures gate”. The past, present, and future bleed into one another, in a way that poetry allows. The effect is dream-like and, like a dream, you are carried through fragmented chronologies.

Emotionally dissociative and cutting at turns, Hôtel Amour asks to be felt.

Reviewed by Jenni Hampshire.