Full Moon on Fish Street
August 2018, Beautiful Dragons Press
A story about art, myth, climate change, and love at the water's edge.
The Other City
November 2016, Seren books. The Other City was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award. You can buy it from Seren here.
Reviews for The Other City:
Rhiannon Hooson’s The Other City is a brilliant, lyrical, musical collection of poems. These are poems as artworks, in which every single sentence is beautifully and elegantly constructed. The book opens with the image of rocks being thrown onto a frozen reservoir, before exploring the slow sinking of those rocks through the thawing ice over time, and that’s a good image for the great power of these poems. These poems have great restraint, they never fully explain themselves, and what that does is draw you back again and again to them – this is poetry which fills your head when you’re not reading the book as well as when you are. We were reminded of the work of Tiffany Atkinson, but only in the sense that Rhiannon Hooson’s voice is as original, fully-realised and as much her own as Atkinson’s is. And also we didn’t think it was too extravagant a comparison to think of these poems alongside the work of Louis MacNeice, in their haunting, distinctive and powerful music and their formal brilliance. It’s a cliché of course with a first collection to say that this book promises great things for the future and, while that’s true, it should be absolutely clear that this book is already at a pitch of achievement that many of us won’t reach across a career. - Jonathan Edwards, Wales Book of the Year Judge
This is a beguiling debut from a poet who already has a recognizable voice and emotional register. Sensuous, musical, darkly involved, the poems make and confound their own realities. Each is beautifully detailed, each rich with memory and possibility, haunted by presence and absence, by a terrific and sometimes terrifying sense of the forces that condition human experience and relationships. The Other City is compelling and provocative work from an authentically engaged poetic imagination. - Graham Mort
It seems never summer in The Other City, but always a season where frost and snow delineate the framework of life, deadening air or splitting water with ferocious sharpness. Animals are both ordinary and god-like, people are known through remembered histories, powerful elemental forces seem casually every-day. There is a shifting 'end of century' atmosphere pervading, like you are glimpsing a world wrapped in the cotton-wool air of an old drawer, but Rhiannon Hooson's voice and vision is new and clear. For me, this collection is like spider’s web laced with dew drops. Each miniscule bead of water is a poem magnifying the Other City; light invades the prism and we on the outside view a flash of what might have been, or yet, what is to come. To sum up, stunning, well-crafted poems dusted with imagination and intrigue - my favourite poetry book of 2017. - Emma van Woerkom
Hooson’s style is thoughtful, questioning, reflective, and consistently restrained. Her collection gives the impression of having come together over a long period, with each piece earning its place. In ‘Origami’, where repetitions evoke the effect of different folds, she writes ‘... We work paper / so we do not have to cover it with words.’ Yet her words have the delicacy and precision of the art form’s fine creases. The unnamed teacher of origami shares the same human need for ritual as Hooson’s Welsh ancestors but she never forces the point on the reader. Instead, she shows us their worlds, leaving us to deduce the overlap. It’s a beautifully balanced collection. - D.A. Prince, OrbisMore reviews for The Other City can be found on the Seren listing page, here.
This Reckless Beauty
2004, Wild Women Press. Gerard Wozek described the pamphlet as “(pushing) Hooson to the forefront of literary female voices."
There are only a few copies left, but they are available to buy below.
Reviews for This Reckless Beauty:
“A work of both tender intimacy and powerful clarity, This Reckless Beauty pushes Rhiannon Hooson to the forefront of literary female voices. Hooson’s project is to cast human love and all its entanglements into a mythic framework, thereby giving the reader an archetypal vision of what we strive to receive most from both ourselves and others, a kind of abiding and unspoken acceptance. With subjects ranging from the imagination to immortality, Hooson stands unabashedly vulnerable to the reader and successfully captures the reverberations ofyearning within these fierce poems. Artfully weaving the erotic with the sublime, Hooson’s nostalgia for the limited ‘reckless beauty’, is a work of lasting substance, revealing our own unexamined desires and demiurges.”
Gerard Wozek
“Uncompromising and sharp-edged. Her Welsh ancestry and heritage give her voice a strength which is rarely associated with women poets. Hers is an imagination fed and coloured by a variety of mythologies and histories. The rhythmic arch and span of the lines have an almost incantatory balance and counterpoise, and some of these poems could be the voice of the bard singing of battles, of mythic hunts, of heroic loves. If ever a book belied the idea of women’s poetry as ‘sentimental’, this collection is it.”
Joanna Boulter
“In This Reckless Beauty the modern world and that of myth are seamlessly joined, giving the poems a resonance that pulls the reader up short… I found myself entranced.” Lyn Moir
“Rhiannon Hooson’s poetry glistens in the dark like a pointed end of a spear. It is sensual and dangerous, revelling in the primal forces simultaneously held and released by each." Charles Bennett
