The Ophelia Letters

The poems of Rebecca Tamas are of profound and uplifting promise; the wrench of the emotional and hotly physical is calibrated with exquisite lyrical aplomb. -- Alan Warner Rebecca Tamas is a truly exciting new talent. Combining crisp conceptual boldness with wonderfully powerful, sensual imagery, her poems keep a sharp focus on particulars while broadening out to a wide-ranging expansiveness. Her poems are enormously pleasurable in the finest sense: unsettling, bracing, challenging, emboldening and enriching. They have a dynamic ability to surprise, yet smack of inevitability. Hers is a genuinely individual voice, a vivid music, in which the ordinary becomes extraordinary. -- Alan Gillis Whilst many pamphlets by new poets feel workshopped into something tame, Rebecca Tamas' is feral. Beautiful, funny, disturbing and messy, The Ophelia Letters shows a poet unafraid to get 'mucky fingers'. Tamas tells the truth with guts and glamour. -- Clare Pollard

The Ophelia Letters explores the interaction between self and place, and the way the normal can become strange and freighted with magic.

The poems in the first half of The Ophelia Letters explore the interaction between self and place in ways both strange and loaded with magic: journeying to the Arctic with Werner Herzog, stopping off in Scottish islands and English wildernesses, revealing an electric language of the road that is both expansive and complex. In long title poem Tamás pours this fractured, cut-throat lyricism into the figure of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, attempting to retrieve a silenced female voice from darkness, to let the light in.