Poetry Review – HOTEL AMOUR: Sarah Leavesley finds this collection by Deryn Rees-Jones offers questions and images that are endlessly fascinating
Hôtel Amour.
Deryn Rees-Jones
Seren
ISBN: 9781781727843
112pp £12.99
It’s difficult to review any poetry collection comprehensively. This is particularly the case with Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones – it covers so much ground and the poems themselves need to be read to get all the beauty.
Trying to sum up the whole, I would say it is simultaneously of time and out of time, of the body/out of the body, of Paris yet also unconfined by place. This doubleness is intriguingly set up at the very start by a single line on the page: ‘It was time’. Then, after the section marker THE HOTEL, the opening lines mention this was once one of Paris’s most famous brothels, before becoming this ‘quiet street’ hotel, where the narrator is going to stay:
[…] here the sky had managed to
place itself, unknowingly, on a great hinge of between-ness: here was space,
time, and, if you, too, paused to look up, here dreaming, here thinking,
What follows, across three sections, is a lyrical continuation of such dream and thought, love and loss, memory and sadness, illness, poetry and life. To give a small taste: ‘A body remembered itself in fragments. Books, fluttering pages talked to each other, sometimes with a kind of fury, sometimes with a kind of tenderness. Paths and splinters, ways forward, false starts, and steps, meaning making itself in a prism of reference.’ It is worth noting in passing that I think this – fragments, paths and splinters, a prism of reference – is one key to how the collection is best read.
Across the book, Rees-Jones also references Schrödinger’s kitten/cat both implicitly and explicitly; this is another gesture to the simultaneous ‘of’ /‘not of’ and in-between aspects. Other examples include remembering a love(r), the nature of memory: ‘Edges, loss. It was over and it was beginning’; or ‘But where did a person reside? (And there a part of her, a small, fleshly, sore part of her, might have answered, between the living and the dead,’. One reason for this pervading element may be found at the end to the poem entitled “(vii)” in the second section: ‘[…] These days, we’re all so split.’ But also, perhaps, it’s the nature of loss.
Trying to capture the nature of the self haunts the book too, with lines in THE HOTEL such as ‘Now a sense of herself quivered & puckered like the damaged edges of a piece of cloth’.
Then again, yet differently, in the striking and resonating poem “(xvii)” of the second section:
[…] 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, […]
The beautiful several lines-long description here includes the idea that it’s like the chords of ‘the self / elsewhere’ , ‘orchestration, with no orchestra’, and ‘no self without an other, others’.
If self is elusive (especially after loss), so is poetry. Earlier in THE HOTEL:
Somewhere everything rhymed.
And when she tried to, to wrench into shape the sounds and pictures, the poems
sat like little squares, or monuments to thought,
held together like a concertina
into which she wanted the world’s air to breathe.
In this quote, the several lines of white space on the page between pieces of text is typical of the collection’s opening and closing (first and third) sections. Again, I can simultaneously read that as space into which the world’s air is now being blown or the space the narrator wishes was there.
It may seem strange to consider the collection’s structure now rather than at the start of my review. But I do so because the structure only really unfolds fully in the actual reading. There is no contents page. Flicking through the book, one finds there are three sections: THE HOTEL (lyrical fragmentary prose poetry), a second untitled section of 24 more traditionally shaped poems and another stunning fragmentary poem, then THE GARDEN with similar style lines to the first section. What is revealed in reading is way more intricate and nuanced than this first impression. The prose poetry is in fact a mixture of blocks/paragraphs of several sentences interspersed with single or grouped long and short partial sentence lines, some also incorporating indenting or right-alignment. Mostly, there is a lot of white-line spacing between fragments but also one longer part resembling a free verse poem within the overarching fragmentary flow.
Meanwhile, the 24 Roman-numeral-titling-only poems of the second section are fourteen lines long, the form of a free verse sonnet. But they are also more than that. On the surface, the two stanzas of these are 7 lines each, embodying a (separated) partnership/love affair. Yet, in fact, many of these poems are more like thirteen-and-a-half lines, the closing line having lost part of the length a reader might anticipate from its predecessors. And yet, this also isn’t entirely accurate. The final lines of, for example, “(i)”, “(xiv)” and “(xix)” spill over, while the final full-length lines are broken up by white spacing within them in “(xiii)” and “(xv)”. The form here is, as in the rest of the book, very much mirroring the experience being captured: love, loss and memory, but also dream and thought… as at the end of “(xxiv)”:
[…] The fizz of light: sparklers in
a hotel car park. Our lives apart become the memory
of a memory, thought before the thought.
That the cumulative effect of this second section is important is highlighted by each piece having a sequential number rather than words for a title. Even if these poems are separated more from one another than the other sections’ continuous fragmentary flow (with just white space separations), they have a particular place within this section and the collection.
But what is the book’s overarching narrative specifically? Love, loss and illness are all captured in vivid specific details, but exactly who these people are is more ghostlike-ly elusive. This is especially the case where the second person is used. The ambiguity of this ‘you’ is often such that it might not even be a person.
In the first and third sections, the narration is (predominantly) a third-person ‘she’. The second part has a first-person narrator. Are these the same or different people? I feel they are the same, but I’m not entirely sure, even on re-reading. The concerns are certainly similar, yet also different. This may be the point: that every instance of love (desire) and loss is both the same and different between any couple, or the same couple when one lover/partner relives this in their memory. For me, it is certainly another aspect of the ‘of’-yet-also-‘not of’-ness of Hôtel Amour. It could be the same narrator from a different viewpoint, but perhaps it’s not – the state of one or the other of these being true only decided (if at all) by the reader as they’re reading.
For those who like to dip in and out rather than read collections consecutively, the thought-provoking, lyrical beauty of the lines, images and metaphors are all there, whichever fragments or poems are read. It’s the cumulative effects and narrative that may be harder to link together. The heart-breakingness in particular increased significantly for me the further through I got.
Even reading the whole, the narrative defies one clear-cut linear understanding, though repetition and recurring motifs pull things back together at least briefly before they part again. A son and daughter in some other country are referenced in the first part and then again in the third. Blossom, water and 3am are among the smaller specifics that recur.
A significant recurring phrase is ‘A hundred ways of loving and a hundred harms.’. But this is also repetition with change in the context of the phrasing if not the words, moving everything onwards. The same is true of the details and imagery that re-appear at different points. Take the heart, which is significant and features symbolically, physically and transformationally, if at times slipperily so.
In “(iii)”, the narrator sees a slab of what might be steak on the pavement and surmises/questions: ‘A pound of flesh, pulled from / a restaurant crate?’. Birds peck at it and a car revs, then we’re told ‘Ghost heart, lost breath.’. An occurrence of ‘A hundred ways […]’ follows. Then, at the end of the same poem, the narrator wants ‘you’ to come through the door and:
[…] to be not that puddle
of sinew & blood on the floor, but a poem, alive again.
You, holding me, in ordinary arms, like air.
In this poem alone, I think I’m seeing a heart, a literal piece of meat that’s also symbolic of the heart of a lost love. But if so, is that loss the end of an affair or a literal death? I can’t quite decide. Then though, ‘you’ is not a person anyway but a poem (the penultimate line). However, this is twisted once more as the poem closes with a line so physical that ‘you’ initially feels like a person/lover again, the poem now perhaps the only way of bringing them back to life. Or maybe not. With more reflection, I recognise it may also be circling back to the earlier poem from THE HOTEL that needed air to breathe.
Humour is referenced in “(iii)”’s opening in relation to the hotel’s psychedelic carpet, so I suspect this is, at one level, Rees-Jones playing with the nature of expectation, words, and poetry. And yet, at the same time, given the love and loss throughout the book, I wonder if it is perhaps intended to be all of these at the same time: the love(r) and poem/poetry just two aspects of trying to comprehend loss and memory’s fallibility.
At a meta-level, this might be about writing, the nature of poetry and art. But also, perhaps, it is partly conveying a sense that everything in our experience is connected, even if we can’t always see the linking threads. And then again, it could simultaneously be suggesting something too that’s nearer to its opposite. Why would we expect a single simple linking narrative, sense of self or life, rather than one that has several different meanings simultaneously? Any single thread may run entirely through one reading/meaning without linking to any other potential meaning at all except through using the same words.
On re-reading the whole collection, I realise this too is alluded to from the start: ‘And it was tempting, always, to stitch everything together, to make meanings from it all as on the world went, with its particularities and rhythms.’
For me, the multiple potential ways of understanding things are partially suggested by what I’ve already read. Context is important here for the bigger picture’s widest range of narrative possibilities. It’s just that the surrounding context keeps shifting, as does the form. Time shifts too – quietly jumping backwards and forwards between past, present and future – and place does as well – moving between the hotel, the narrator’s apartment, elsewhere in the city… But do these embody the shifting narrative, cause it or perhaps both? I still can’t decide, as everything here is in motion, as is explicitly referenced in poem “(xxiii)”: ‘What is love but unlearning the shivers, tremors, small specks/ we are,shifting on the shifting stage […]’
I am perhaps predisposed towards loving Hôtel Amour. Besides admiring Rees-Jones’s work for many years, I studied French at university, so enjoy the interspersed untranslated French fragments, cultural allusions and connotations. But again, I don’t think such knowledge is necessary. The French is atmospheric and the allusions, connotations and recuring motifs are part of both the richness and the pull towards re-reading again for more.
The Paris métro is a repeated reference point and another potential metaphor for what’s offered to readers visiting Hôtel Amour. Like the métro, the book has many lines with many potential connection spots, creating multiple different journeys. Any station along the way has its own scenery and landmarks: evocative imagery, vivid sense impressions, lyrical lines, intensely moving moments, and more. If a reader resides with or within the poems, taking different lines and making different stops, they’re likely to uncover even more highlights and discover new connections. Just as it’s never possible to entirely know a city like Paris, this too is a potential exploration without end. It offers the joy of reading and re-reading moving, dreamy and thought-provoking poetry!
Sep 23 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Deryn Rees-Jones
Poetry Review – HOTEL AMOUR: Sarah Leavesley finds this collection by Deryn Rees-Jones offers questions and images that are endlessly fascinating
It’s difficult to review any poetry collection comprehensively. This is particularly the case with Hôtel Amour by Deryn Rees-Jones – it covers so much ground and the poems themselves need to be read to get all the beauty.
Trying to sum up the whole, I would say it is simultaneously of time and out of time, of the body/out of the body, of Paris yet also unconfined by place. This doubleness is intriguingly set up at the very start by a single line on the page: ‘It was time’. Then, after the section marker THE HOTEL, the opening lines mention this was once one of Paris’s most famous brothels, before becoming this ‘quiet street’ hotel, where the narrator is going to stay:
What follows, across three sections, is a lyrical continuation of such dream and thought, love and loss, memory and sadness, illness, poetry and life. To give a small taste: ‘A body remembered itself in fragments. Books, fluttering pages talked to each other, sometimes with a kind of fury, sometimes with a kind of tenderness. Paths and splinters, ways forward, false starts, and steps, meaning making itself in a prism of reference.’ It is worth noting in passing that I think this – fragments, paths and splinters, a prism of reference – is one key to how the collection is best read.
Across the book, Rees-Jones also references Schrödinger’s kitten/cat both implicitly and explicitly; this is another gesture to the simultaneous ‘of’ /‘not of’ and in-between aspects. Other examples include remembering a love(r), the nature of memory: ‘Edges, loss. It was over and it was beginning’; or ‘But where did a person reside? (And there a part of her, a small, fleshly, sore part of her, might have answered, between the living and the dead,’. One reason for this pervading element may be found at the end to the poem entitled “(vii)” in the second section: ‘[…] These days, we’re all so split.’ But also, perhaps, it’s the nature of loss.
Trying to capture the nature of the self haunts the book too, with lines in THE HOTEL such as ‘Now a sense of herself quivered & puckered like the damaged edges of a piece of cloth’.
Then again, yet differently, in the striking and resonating poem “(xvii)” of the second section:
The beautiful several lines-long description here includes the idea that it’s like the chords of ‘the self / elsewhere’ , ‘orchestration, with no orchestra’, and ‘no self without an other, others’.
If self is elusive (especially after loss), so is poetry. Earlier in THE HOTEL:
In this quote, the several lines of white space on the page between pieces of text is typical of the collection’s opening and closing (first and third) sections. Again, I can simultaneously read that as space into which the world’s air is now being blown or the space the narrator wishes was there.
It may seem strange to consider the collection’s structure now rather than at the start of my review. But I do so because the structure only really unfolds fully in the actual reading. There is no contents page. Flicking through the book, one finds there are three sections: THE HOTEL (lyrical fragmentary prose poetry), a second untitled section of 24 more traditionally shaped poems and another stunning fragmentary poem, then THE GARDEN with similar style lines to the first section. What is revealed in reading is way more intricate and nuanced than this first impression. The prose poetry is in fact a mixture of blocks/paragraphs of several sentences interspersed with single or grouped long and short partial sentence lines, some also incorporating indenting or right-alignment. Mostly, there is a lot of white-line spacing between fragments but also one longer part resembling a free verse poem within the overarching fragmentary flow.
Meanwhile, the 24 Roman-numeral-titling-only poems of the second section are fourteen lines long, the form of a free verse sonnet. But they are also more than that. On the surface, the two stanzas of these are 7 lines each, embodying a (separated) partnership/love affair. Yet, in fact, many of these poems are more like thirteen-and-a-half lines, the closing line having lost part of the length a reader might anticipate from its predecessors. And yet, this also isn’t entirely accurate. The final lines of, for example, “(i)”, “(xiv)” and “(xix)” spill over, while the final full-length lines are broken up by white spacing within them in “(xiii)” and “(xv)”. The form here is, as in the rest of the book, very much mirroring the experience being captured: love, loss and memory, but also dream and thought… as at the end of “(xxiv)”:
That the cumulative effect of this second section is important is highlighted by each piece having a sequential number rather than words for a title. Even if these poems are separated more from one another than the other sections’ continuous fragmentary flow (with just white space separations), they have a particular place within this section and the collection.
But what is the book’s overarching narrative specifically? Love, loss and illness are all captured in vivid specific details, but exactly who these people are is more ghostlike-ly elusive. This is especially the case where the second person is used. The ambiguity of this ‘you’ is often such that it might not even be a person.
In the first and third sections, the narration is (predominantly) a third-person ‘she’. The second part has a first-person narrator. Are these the same or different people? I feel they are the same, but I’m not entirely sure, even on re-reading. The concerns are certainly similar, yet also different. This may be the point: that every instance of love (desire) and loss is both the same and different between any couple, or the same couple when one lover/partner relives this in their memory. For me, it is certainly another aspect of the ‘of’-yet-also-‘not of’-ness of Hôtel Amour. It could be the same narrator from a different viewpoint, but perhaps it’s not – the state of one or the other of these being true only decided (if at all) by the reader as they’re reading.
For those who like to dip in and out rather than read collections consecutively, the thought-provoking, lyrical beauty of the lines, images and metaphors are all there, whichever fragments or poems are read. It’s the cumulative effects and narrative that may be harder to link together. The heart-breakingness in particular increased significantly for me the further through I got.
Even reading the whole, the narrative defies one clear-cut linear understanding, though repetition and recurring motifs pull things back together at least briefly before they part again. A son and daughter in some other country are referenced in the first part and then again in the third. Blossom, water and 3am are among the smaller specifics that recur.
A significant recurring phrase is ‘A hundred ways of loving and a hundred harms.’. But this is also repetition with change in the context of the phrasing if not the words, moving everything onwards. The same is true of the details and imagery that re-appear at different points. Take the heart, which is significant and features symbolically, physically and transformationally, if at times slipperily so.
In “(iii)”, the narrator sees a slab of what might be steak on the pavement and surmises/questions: ‘A pound of flesh, pulled from / a restaurant crate?’. Birds peck at it and a car revs, then we’re told ‘Ghost heart, lost breath.’. An occurrence of ‘A hundred ways […]’ follows. Then, at the end of the same poem, the narrator wants ‘you’ to come through the door and:
In this poem alone, I think I’m seeing a heart, a literal piece of meat that’s also symbolic of the heart of a lost love. But if so, is that loss the end of an affair or a literal death? I can’t quite decide. Then though, ‘you’ is not a person anyway but a poem (the penultimate line). However, this is twisted once more as the poem closes with a line so physical that ‘you’ initially feels like a person/lover again, the poem now perhaps the only way of bringing them back to life. Or maybe not. With more reflection, I recognise it may also be circling back to the earlier poem from THE HOTEL that needed air to breathe.
Humour is referenced in “(iii)”’s opening in relation to the hotel’s psychedelic carpet, so I suspect this is, at one level, Rees-Jones playing with the nature of expectation, words, and poetry. And yet, at the same time, given the love and loss throughout the book, I wonder if it is perhaps intended to be all of these at the same time: the love(r) and poem/poetry just two aspects of trying to comprehend loss and memory’s fallibility.
At a meta-level, this might be about writing, the nature of poetry and art. But also, perhaps, it is partly conveying a sense that everything in our experience is connected, even if we can’t always see the linking threads. And then again, it could simultaneously be suggesting something too that’s nearer to its opposite. Why would we expect a single simple linking narrative, sense of self or life, rather than one that has several different meanings simultaneously? Any single thread may run entirely through one reading/meaning without linking to any other potential meaning at all except through using the same words.
On re-reading the whole collection, I realise this too is alluded to from the start: ‘And it was tempting, always, to stitch everything together, to make meanings from it all as on the world went, with its particularities and rhythms.’
For me, the multiple potential ways of understanding things are partially suggested by what I’ve already read. Context is important here for the bigger picture’s widest range of narrative possibilities. It’s just that the surrounding context keeps shifting, as does the form. Time shifts too – quietly jumping backwards and forwards between past, present and future – and place does as well – moving between the hotel, the narrator’s apartment, elsewhere in the city… But do these embody the shifting narrative, cause it or perhaps both? I still can’t decide, as everything here is in motion, as is explicitly referenced in poem “(xxiii)”: ‘What is love but unlearning the shivers, tremors, small specks/ we are,shifting on the shifting stage […]’
I am perhaps predisposed towards loving Hôtel Amour. Besides admiring Rees-Jones’s work for many years, I studied French at university, so enjoy the interspersed untranslated French fragments, cultural allusions and connotations. But again, I don’t think such knowledge is necessary. The French is atmospheric and the allusions, connotations and recuring motifs are part of both the richness and the pull towards re-reading again for more.
The Paris métro is a repeated reference point and another potential metaphor for what’s offered to readers visiting Hôtel Amour. Like the métro, the book has many lines with many potential connection spots, creating multiple different journeys. Any station along the way has its own scenery and landmarks: evocative imagery, vivid sense impressions, lyrical lines, intensely moving moments, and more. If a reader resides with or within the poems, taking different lines and making different stops, they’re likely to uncover even more highlights and discover new connections. Just as it’s never possible to entirely know a city like Paris, this too is a potential exploration without end. It offers the joy of reading and re-reading moving, dreamy and thought-provoking poetry!