The glowing, painterly poems of Jenny Lewis's first collection take soundings in the depths: of the layers of the pasts that create a life, of the sources of self and creativity, of the structures beneath the surface. It is a region of loss and of recovery, the realm where memories are stored and poetry is made. Ghosts appear. An unknown father, the young South Wales Borderer' who died when Lewis was a few months old, bequeaths an irrecoverable sense of incompleteness to his child. Poems about being sent away to a Masonic school, aged seven, reflect the shadow that loss casts, while a later sequence suggests how the missing pieces may be recovered from the depths. "Fathom" is an intense and textured collection that leads the reader from surfaces to the heart of things. In the end is a sense of affirmation, where self is made whole.
About the Author
Jenny Lewis is an Anglo-Welsh poet, playwright, songwriter, children's author and translator who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art before reading English at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. She has worked as an advertising copywriter and a government press officer for, among others,the Equality and Human Rights Commission. She has also written children's booksand plays and co-written a 26-part children's TV animation series, "James the Cat". Her first poetry sequence, "When I Became an Amazon" (Iron Press, 1996) was broadcast on BBC Woman's Hour, translated into Russian (Bilingua, 2002) and made into an opera with music by Gennadyi Shizoglazov which had its world premiere with the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in Perm, Russia,November 2017. A song Jenny co-wrote with the singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyanin the 1960's, 'Train Song', has been used on TV commercials by Reebok and Samsung and for several TV series including the US crime drama, True Detective.It has had over five million hits on YouTube. Since 2012 Jenny has been working with the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh on an award-winning, Arts Council funded project, 'Writing Mesopotamia', which aims to build bridges and foster friendships between English and Arabic-speaking communities. It has produced a huge range of outcomes including art collaborations, films, three chapbooks published by Mulfran Press – "Now as Then: Mesopotamia-Iraq" (2013), "Singing for Inanna" (2014) and "The Flood" (2017). Her work for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford includes "Map of Stars" (2002), "Garden of the Senses" (2005), "After Gilgamesh" (2011) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan al-Sayegh, "Stories for Survival: aRe-telling of the 1001, Arabian Nights" (2015). She has published two collections with Oxford Poets/ Carcanet, "Fathom" (2007) and "Taking Mesopotamia" (2014). 55 poems from "Taking Mesopotamia" were published in Farsi (Soolar, Teheran 2017)and a fuller selection of her poems in English and Arabic, "Even at the Edge of the World" is forthcoming in 2018 from Dar Sutour, Baghdad/ Dar Al-Rafidain,Beirut. As part of the 'Writing Mesopotamia' project, "Gilgamesh Retold" won the Warden's Prize at Goldsmiths, London University for work that engages the public in innovative ways and it was also shortlisted for a Gladstone's Library Award. Jenny is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths.
Reviews
"Her poems delve into her own past, recalling with powerful specificity..." – Sarah Crown, Guardian
"In this haunted and haunting collection, intuition leads cognition in a pas de deux of great power and beauty" – Jon Stallworthy, Oxford Times
