Erec & Enide - Amy DeAth

Erec & Enide is a bold and unashamedly intimate work that delights in the theatrical, communicative powers of language, and by turns gives way to a quiet sadness. Writing out of contemporary feminist revisions of lyric and epic forms, the poems set up an overtly feminised display which the reader then re-enacts to find meanings which do not ally and a feminism which does not conform to conventional modes of uplift.

Taking its title from Chretien De Troyes' twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Erec & Enide draws on Jack Spicer's The Holy Grail, the pastoral romanticism of John Clare, the feminist projects of Lisa Robertson and the essays of Kathy Acker as it moves through a vibrant, rich and playful mix of underhand lyric. These modern love poems wear their ideologically saturated state on their sleeve, and are all the more loving for that.