In Her Jaws
Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for a best first collection
Shortlisted for Yeats Society Poetry Prize 2023
Longlisted for Polari First Book Prize 2023
“There is more than care in Taylor’s poetry, her fine delicacy is at one with an indefinable sorcery which horrifies and exhilarates.”
— Martina Evans, The Irish Times
“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.”
— Jane Clarke
“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.”
— Seán Hewitt
“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.”
— Paul Maddern
“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.”
— Doireann Ní Ghríofa
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. Rosamund 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.
Read Rosamund’s essay on what lead her to write In Her Jaws, On Jeanne d’Arc and Being Highly Vulnerable, published in The Irish Times.
Read or Listen to Poems from In Her Jaws
Pride 2017 (read on YouTube)