Reading and In Conversation with Denise Riley and Deryn Rees-Jones Review
Denise Riley and Deryn Rees-Jones, 27th June 2026, Reading and In Conversation Event.
Conversation between Jenni Hampshire and Rose Schierig (abridged version - full audio at the bottom of the page).
RS: We attended Denise Riley and Deryn Rees-Jones reading their new works A Chorus of Ears and Hôtel Amour. We are going to speak about their “shared preoccupation”: in the conversation following their readings Denise described the “similarities of preoccupation” between her and Deryn’s work. Jenni is going to read an extract from Hôtel Amour, which deals with this preoccupation.
JH: I am going to read part of a sonnet from this book. This book is almost a full-length narrative lyric, but there is a section where we suddenly find the form of the sonnet. We’re going to read the first stanza of sonnet seventeen because it speaks to that shared preoccupation of what the poetic self is or could be, or might not be.
Over and Over like an analysis. What I like best in a poet
or rather the poem, by which I mean — of course — the
poet, is an ability to lose the self. You, over and over,
neither one thing nor another, a voice working, seeding
speeding, settling and unsettling, playing through, not even
an imagined world or other but the chords, let’s say, of the self
elsewhere.
RS: I think “the self elsewhere” is an interesting point to finish on.
JH: It is; Denise’s work is very much about emphasising the voice of the poem rather than the poet. And Deryn’s work, being lyric none the less, feeds into that sense of multiplicity; there’s a lot of talk of ‘cells’ repeating, biological cells, and she even said that part of the enjoyment of that is it’s so much like the word ‘self’.
RS: In Denise’s book she talks about the importance of the poem as its own being outside of the voice of the poet, alongside an analysis of other matters such as award culture. She spoke about how this can lead to “feverish rivalries amongst writers”.
JH: Denise spoke of the “oxymoron of a poetic career”.
RS: That relationship between the poem itself and how the poet has to handle their poetry within the world.
JH: The impression I got was that she might consider it a hindrance. The language of poetry, the voice of poetry wanting to come through us may well be interrupted by needs to shoe horn it into something that’s going to win a prize.
RS: Yes, she mentioned conversations with younger writers who felt they needed to tailor their work, to be the right kind of poem for journals and competitions, and that being something that overtakes the poem in its truest self, maybe?
JH: It’s interesting because of course people respond differently to constraints, for some people pitching for a competition or magazine might be wonderfully generative, others might work at a slower place, where things unfold over the years.
RS: Maybe it was the poem as being jeopardised by the poet, the poet’s ulterior motives?
JH: Potentially, you can definitely get in your own way can’t you? I think it’s that thing of imagining you have all that authorial control when so much of creative work is an accident, the accident of which words come most easily from your mouth; what you've been exposed to; the people you interact with. All these accidents fundamentally change the work you produce. Stepping back from this idea of the poet as a persona who’s completely in charge of their virtuosic sort of creation is valid.
In comparison to Denise’s essays, Deryn’s book is essentially a long lyric poem, but it’s quite free form and then it condenses into these sonnets all of a sudden in first person. It opens up again for the end sequence, it isn’t prose but not pure poetic form either?
RS: A little bit of a hybrid?
JH: Deryn said these things are a canvas for thinking about lyric for her, she likes to think about why prose doesn’t quite work but she still uses it. She spoke about finding habitations: “where part of ourselves might find some kind of habitation”- a beautiful way of putting it in terms of lyric poetry. Finding an appropriate shape, to give a home to what needs to be said, I found that very interesting.
RS: Having reviewed Hôtel Amour, how did you find the experience of reading it from the page and watching it read aloud?
JH: There was a remarkable coherence, the way I read it in my head had a lot of coherence to the way that Deryn read it. The lines scattered across the page, whether conscious or not, held a lot of artistry in how it was conveyed. It was communicated in her live reading, as well as on the page.
RS: I thought the bird sequence she read at the end was very impactful, it had a song-like quality to it. Did you say that on the page some of that was struck out?
JH: Yes, on Page 109, this block has erased sections and lines struck through. But nonetheless, Deryn read it and she read it with a tempo. It’s a sing-song little block, there’s rhyme, there’s movement. In terms of thinking of the poem’s self, it’s interesting to note that it came through her body.
RS: To go back to A Chorus of Ears, that this is her thinking delivered not in poems, but in a wider, larger reflection. How did you find reading the book?
JH: Dizzying! In a good way. There were these moments where the meaning coalesces into a metaphor, the ponies all skittish standing in for poets on a stage anxiously trotting around for their rosettes.
RS: I think it’s interesting her focus on both poetry and the figure of the poet herself.
JH: What it means to be a poet, how to get away from the weight of that. The hindrances of your autobiography getting in the way.
RS: How the poet gets in the way of the poem? Yeah, both concerned with self and the multiplicity of self- would that be fair to say in terms of Hôtel Amour would you say?
JH: I would say so in the sense that time compresses memories, and futures and pasts and it all gets mashed up. In which you have all these chapters but moments that collide, that feels very multiple.
RS: It was great to hear them alongside each other, I think they really spoke to each other and they were fascinating books that you (reader) should go and read!
JH: Start with our reviews and then go and get the book!
RS: So that was the last event ahead of the main festival which is going to be at the start of October, so keep an eye out on the social media and the website!
