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"Modern Women Poets" is the companion anthology to Deryn Rees-Jones's pioneering critical study, "Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets". While its selections illuminate and illustrate her essays, Deryn Rees-Jones's superb anthology works in its own right as the best possible introduction to a whole century of poetry by women. The anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing, while not isolating women's writing from its intersection with the work of male contemporaries. Tracing an arc from Charlotte Mew to Stevie Smith, from Sylvia Plath to the writing emerging from the Women's Movement, and to the more recent work of Medbh McGuckian, Jo Shapcott and Carol Ann Duffy, the anthology draws together the work of women poets from Britain, Ireland and America as one version of a history of women's poetic writing. It shows important connections between the work of women poets and shows how - throughout past 100 years - they have developed strategies for engaging with a male-dominated tradition. "Modern Women Poets" allows the reader to trace women's negotiations with one another's work, as well as to reflect more generally on the politics of women's engagement with history, nature, politics, motherhood, science, religion, the body, sexuality, identity, death, love, and poetry itself.

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In this pioneering critical study, Deryn Rees-Jones discusses the work of some of the major women poets of the last hundred years, showing how they have explored what it has meant to be a woman poet writing in a male-dominated poetic tradition. Beginning with Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, she shows how an older generation resisted easy categorisation by forging highly individual aesthetics and self-presentation. For Edith Sitwell, the woman poet was to be ‘as eloquent as a peacock’. Stevie Smith compared poetry to ‘a strong explosion in the sky’ but did not consider gender to be an important factor. Sylvia Plath, who admired the work of both these poets, wanted to write in a way which was ‘not quailing and whining’ but to produce ‘working, sweating, heaving poems born out the way words should be said.’ Anne Sexton, in her poem ‘Consorting with Angels’, writes that she is ‘tired of the gender of things’ ‘not a woman anymore,/ not one thing or the other’. But despite their brilliance, their perceived eccentricity – along with the suicides of Plath and Sexton – made these major figures difficult acts to follow. Deryn Rees-Jones then considers the poetry written in their wake, with essays covering poets such as Moniza Alvi, Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Lavinia Greenlaw, Selima Hill, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Medbh McGuckian, Alice Oswald and Jo Shapcott. While these women all have very different writing styles, Rees-Jones argues that common strategies emerge which link them to their poetic predecessors, showing how they have developed an aesthetic which allows them to explore their femininity. Taking account of the importance to these women of the work of their male contemporaries, her incisive essays open up new perspectives on the poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries. Deryn Rees-Jones’s companion anthology Modern Women Poets is published at the same time as Consorting with Angels.

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Paula Rego is an artist of astonishing power with a unique and unforgettable aesthetic. Taking its cues from the artist, this fascinating study invites us to reflect on the complexities of storytelling on which Rego’s work draws, emphasizing both the stories the pictures tell, and how it is that they are told. Deryn Rees-Jones sets interpretations of the pictures in the context of Rego’s personal and artistic development across sixty years. We see how Rego’s art intersects with the work of both the literary and the visual, and come to understand her rich and textured layering of reference: her use of the Old Masters; fiction, fairy tales and poems; the folk traditions of Rego’s native Portugal; and her wider engagement with politics, feminism and more. The result is a highly original work that addresses urgent and topical questions of gender, subject and object, self and other.

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From a range of perspectives, the essays in this volume tackle some of the most urgent issues facing the creative writer in today's academic institutions. For many years now the professional "creative writer" within universities and other institutions has encompassed a range of roles, embracing a plurality of scholarly and creative identities. The often complex relation between those identities forms the broad focus of this book, which also examines various, and variously fraught, dialogues between creative writers, "hybrid" writers and academic colleagues from other subjects within single institutions, and with the public and the media. At the heart of the book is the principle of "creative writing" as a fully-fledged discipline, an important subject for debate at a time when the future of the humanities is in crisis; the contributors, all writers and teachers themselves, provide first-hand views on crucial questions: What are the most fruitful intersections between creative writing and scholarship? What methodological overlaps exist between creative writing and literary studies, and what can each side of the "divide" learn from its counterpart? Equally, from a pedagogical perspective, what kind of writing should be taught to students to ensure that the discipline remains relevant? And is the writing workshop still the best way of teaching creative writing? The essays here tackle these points from a range of perspectives, including close readings, historical contextualisation and theoretical exploration. Professor Richard Marggraf Turley teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University. C

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