Description
The poems in the first half of The Ophelia Letters explore the interaction between self and place in ways both strange and loaded with magic: journeying to the Arctic with Werner Herzog, stopping off in Scottish islands and English wildernesses, revealing an electric language of the road that is both expansive and complex. In long title poem Tamas pours this fractured, cut-throat lyricism into the figure of Shakespeare's Ophelia, attempting to retrieve a silenced female voice from darkness, to let the light in.
The poems of Rebecca Tamas are of profound and uplifting promise; the wrench of the emotional and hotly physical is calibrated with exquisite lyrical aplomb. -- Alan Warner Rebecca Tamas is a truly exciting new talent. Combining crisp conceptual boldness with wonderfully powerful, sensual imagery, her poems keep a sharp focus on particulars while broadening out to a wide-ranging expansiveness. Her poems are enormously pleasurable in the finest sense: unsettling, bracing, challenging, emboldening and enriching. They have a dynamic ability to surprise, yet smack of inevitability. Hers is a genuinely individual voice, a vivid music, in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary. -- Alan Gillis Whilst many pamphlets by new poets feel workshopped into something tame, Rebecca Tamas' is feral. Beautiful, funny, disturbing and messy, The Ophelia Letters shows a poet unafraid to get 'mucky fingers'. Tamas tells the truth with guts and glamour. -- Clare Pollard
About the Author
Rebecca Tamas was born in London in 1988. She studied at the University of Warwick and at the University of Edinburgh, where she won the Grierson Verse Prize. Her poems have been published in a variety of magazines and journals including Magma, Oxford Poetry and The SHOp. She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at The University of East Anglia. This is her first book of poems.
Awards
Short-listed for Saboteur Awards: Best Poetry Pamphlet 2014 (UK).
Book Information
ISBN 9781844719525
Author Rebecca Tamas
Page Count 40
Imprint Salt Publishing
Publisher Salt Publishing
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 3mm
