In Her Jaws by Rosamund Taylor
80 pages
Paperback
19 May 2022
ISBN: 978-1-8383126-4-0
Shortlisted:
Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize 2023
Yeats Society Poetry Prize 2023
Longlisted:
Polari First Book Prize 2023
Tasting her still, I’d walk home
in smog, frost, past burnt-out cars,
and under bridges, as though the night
was safer than her bed.
In her debut collection, Rosamund Taylor dares us across thresholds and invites us to glimpse the world as we’ve never seen it before. She boldly charts a journey of survival and transformation with poems on history reimagined, astronomy, sorcery, wild landscapes, talismanic creatures, and queer love.
Taylor explores what it means to live in a female body that is not defined by lack, or want, or perpetual suffering, but is possessed by a real and defined sense of erotic autonomy.
These poems burn from the inside out with possibility, and there is magic, mystery and reclamation at every turn. In Her Jaws is a landmark debut that extends and deepens the Irish tradition of writing the female perspective, while also breaking new ground.
About the Author
Rosamund Taylor won the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2020 and the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry 2017. Widely published, her work has recently appeared in Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Mslexia, The Rialto and Poetry Ireland Review. A selection of her poems is included in Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (The Lifeboat Press).
Author photo by Ger Holland
Media
Poetry People | RTE Radio One | 28 April 2024
The Irish Times books of the year: best new poetry of 2022 | The Irish Times | 26 November 2022
Rosamund on The Poetry Programme | RTE Radio One | 13 November 2022
Martina Evans reviews In Her Jaws | The Irish Times | 3 September 2022
On Jeanne d’Arc, love and being highly vulnerable | The Irish Times | 23 May 2022
Praise for In Her Jaws
“A book of astonishments whose poems gaze towards the night sky and all that stirs in the dark below, swooping the reader through mysteries of desire and discovery. Taylor’s voice is by turns tender, sharp, luminous; her poems are wondrous.”
“Taylor’s poems possess a talismanic quality. With lyric sorcery, she conjures encounters with a chorus of wild creatures: spectres and lovers, selves and others. Beneath the seductive gleam of her poetry lies an invitation to glimpse the fabulous. In Her Jaws will hold you in thrall.”
“Rosamund Taylor’s stunning debut reignites the lyric tradition with poems that movingly and daringly explore pain and despair, desire and belonging while evoking the more-than-human world anew. Her voice is ever original and ever beautiful.”
“Taylor’s language, form and imagery exhibit a remarkable freshness, resulting in work that manages to create a space between the uncanny and the familiar. Her sexuality and her feminism are carried candidly and address universals through the specifics of queer love and the experiences of women through history. This is the Irish lyric tradition queered in the manifold and finest meanings of that word. Taylor’s is a poetry I do not want to be without. We are all the richer for it.”
“In these haunting, simmering metamorphoses, Rosamund Taylor’s imagination is both intrepid and tender. Spanning the erotic and the traumatic, these poems root through the fibrous dark of our psyche. In Her Jaws is a breath-taking debut.”
“In Her Jaws is an extraordinary achievement with poems gem-like in their intensity, clarity and precision – but make no mistake, there is wildness here too ... This is a debut that leaves bite marks in the most erotic and intoxicating sense ... In Her Jaws is here, finally, and it was certainly worth the wait.”
“In Her Jaws is by turns delicate and fierce; holding the reader gently in its muzzle, where we thrill to the awareness of teeth against our carotid. Taylor inhabits the natural world like no other writer working today; shapeshifting, questioning, and enthralling us with her curiosity. ”
“The reader travels wild paths in skilled hands. Taylor’s voice is evocative, assured and unforgettable. This is absolutely exquisite.”