Beauty/Beauty

Shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize

Shortlisted for the 2015 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize

Shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection 2016

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

The world of Beauty/Beauty is ‘built from the nose/out, like a painting’, accumulating its various feelings, ideas, objects, disappointments and joys to the point of almost overflowing. Preoccupied with demise and loss, as well as reimagination and regeneration, Rebecca Perry’s debut collection has the duality and symmetry of its title at its core.

Beauty/Beauty is a book with tenderness running through its veins, exploring salvation, reparation and the fullness of being alive; the difficulty of defining what love is, the heartbreak, the faraway friends, the overwhelming abundance of things in museums. It is alive with memories, with old loves hanging around in the corners of dark rooms, ghost mouths hidden inside the mouth you are kissing, and eulogies to dearly departed pets.

Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in and explored; a stegosaurus is adored, a million silver spiders play dead, a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers, adorable dogs want to be friends, the flightless grow wings, and the stars turn green.

'We were impressed by the book's refreshing ambition and sophistication, its liveliness and bounce, and how rewarding the poems were as we read and re-read them.' - Judges Professor Deryn Rees-Jones, Professor Karen Leeder and John McAuliffe, The 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize

‘…some of the most interesting names on the shortlist [for the T S Eliot Prize 2015] are the newest ones: Rebecca Perry and Sarah Howe have both been nominated for their debut collections. Perry’s Beauty/Beauty is a book of reflection and symmetry, with several of the poems spaced to look like mirror images of each other. Interested in the ways that languages express love, she is on a quest to view emotion from all possible angles.’ – Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

‘In Beauty/Beauty, she offers female perspectives with openness and vulnerability, in both her themes and experiments with form, to find new ways of writing the feminine. Non-linear images are subverted by shattered narratives, in poems written "from the nose / out, like a painting". Her gaze is not limited to personal experience. It is a triumph of imagination that she is able to empathise with other forms of oppression. She captures the sadness of seas and writes a love poem to a stegosaurus, whose mouth "holds more wonder than a sky full of stars".’ – Pascale Petit, chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges

‘All of the poems in this debut, shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, search for the impossible-to-find… Perry has a chatty, sometimes superficial tone that belies her wry wisdom.’ – Evan Jones, Guardian

‘’”I will be electric in the sweet world”, Rebecca Perry promises near the beginning of Beauty/Beauty, her first full-length collection. The promise is upheld from beginning to end of this arresting book.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, Times Literary Supplement

'Richly self-reliant, these are poems for the girl-power generation. In a world where all is relative, subjective and ironic, their breakages and weaknesses and contradictions get as close to something like sincerity as most young poets dare.' – Kate Bingham, Poetry Review

‘A mural of tiles, each etched carefully with the different, daily eyes, hearts, fins and scales of ghostly others – Beauty/Beauty is an unmissable and energetic collection.’ – Lucy Mercer, Oxford Poetry

‘Reading this 2015 collection of poems took me right back to The Other Country [by Carol Ann Duffy, the book that ‘shocked’ her into poetry] – the same thrill of the new, and recognition of the now. I’m on my fourth copy, as I keep giving it to students.’ – Kate Clanchy, The Week (Best books feature), on Rebecca Perry’s Beauty/Beauty

‘I often go back to Rebecca Perry’s debut collection, Beauty/Beauty, with a little despair, tempted to believe that I haven’t read anything as fresh since. That’s melodramatic, and untrue, but rereading it recently – on the collection’s 10th anniversary – it’s comforting to find images still so original, a voice so distinctly its own. [...] my preference here would be for people to read this book in its entirety, which, 10 years on, still feels idiosyncratic, funny and true.' – Lucy Thynne, Telegraph Culture, Poetry pick of the week, 17 July 2025

Rebecca Perry was born in 1986 in London. She graduated from Manchester’s Centre for New Writing in 2008 and lives in London. She has published several pamphlets, including little armoured (Seren, 2012), which won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; cleanliness of rooms and walls (If a Leaf Falls Press, 2017); insect & lilac (2019), co-authored with Amy Key from a joint residency at Halsway Manor (the National Centre for Folk Arts); and beaches (Offord Road Press, 2019). Her first book-length collection, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books, 2015), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, won the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2017, and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection. Her second book-length collection, Stone Fruit, also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published by Bloodaxe in 2021.