Taking its title from Chretien De Troyes’ twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Erec & Enide moves through a vibrant, rich and playful mix of underhand lyric. A deceptive and light-footed vulnerability unexpectedly folds in on itself to throw up the most serious questions; then resolutely refuses to ‘make sense’ of things.

• Poetry for Boys
• Dreamboat
• Erec & Enide
• Three in a Boat
• 593
• Sonnet
• A Note on Clarity
• David
• Five Exits
• Since We’ve Lived Here
• One Two
• Lisa Jarnot’s Rabbit
• Letter to John Clare
• Lena at the Beach
• Soliloquy for Living People
• Jaguar
• Notes

It is the world’s wild glare that provides the complex heart of Erec & Enide. With wisdom, uncommon wit, and precision, Amy De’Ath’s spirited first book unsettles all things to reveal that neither a language nor a body is a closed system. De’Ath’s is an inclusive imagination that meets the world with lyric intensity and irony – her poems invite us to feel: “stranger, it’s a hunger I’m looking for.”

It is the world's wild glare that provides the complex heart of Erec & Enide. With wisdom, uncommon wit, and precision, Amy De'Ath's spirited first book unsettles all things to reveal that neither a language nor a body is a closed system. De'Ath's is an inclusive imagination that meets the world with lyric intensity and irony - her poems invite us to feel: "stranger, it's a hunger I'm looking for." -- Peter Gizzi Lyrical, local, literary, strong, domestic, delicate, sexy and epic, Amy De'Ath's Erec & Enide also brings the modernity and speed of much recent North American poetry to these too-often inward-looking isles. De'Ath's emphatic arrival on the British poetry scene is cause for both hope and celebration. -- Tim Atkins While we oscillate between life and death, Amy De'Ath's poetry looks to the whir, the engines and the effects of such daily migrations. She ably slows us to take in and weigh the view, to ask how we construct the 'publicity of meaning'. De'Ath's is a sensitive search; and while the unearthed may challenge ('opened every cupboard looking for the nature of it'), the unanswerable space is enriching. Erec & Enide is fiery and soft. Let it carry you on wings of seductive metrics and lyric playfulness, below and between timeless narratives. -- Amy King

Poetry for Boys

That the Joy will soon come and make you suffer!

i

Lay low in the words of the wood,

very subtle, not immune,

lay down in the snow and incline,

you are rest enough and dowry,

in the lay and the spook of an age,

very poor, still glamour,

still further than you think even

more, from the day duly swallow,

to the real green day in the dream,

very full, cracking bough,

the undoing publicity of meaning

all the whole black sky is feeling

the screwing over, resin delight

delightful residual meaning, still night.

ii

I’m a weeping boy and a centaur caving in.

Adventures, find me – I’m hard to come by.

In the days when mirrors were made of burnished silver

I stayed up late,

in the nearly beautiful night I stood not quite

in the shower plenty natural and the water washed into

the time of my skin.

I imagined how to answer the question of whether

psychic malady is a personal affair. Then I wrung

my hair and dye came out.

If I had the money to dip in being a boy,

if I was Anna O., & fallen into autism or

steeped in prelingual glimpses of Lena’s face,

I’d be living system: looped in my own elements.

A system closing talking only to itself.