The right hand resting on her throat

affects the nervous habit of a speaker

for whom the words required are suddenly remote,

for all the prepping she did with the speech

and the mirror the night before...

from ‘Snow White Swallows the Poisoned Apple’

As Deryn Rees-Jones writes in her foreword, one of the most striking elements of Paula Rego’s art is her ability to hint at implied narratives, to dramatise the ‘pause between feeling and action, between knowing and not knowing’. Into this pause, Owen Lowery inserts his own poetic responses to Rego’s works. Drawing on the often disturbing themes of Rego’s works – power, violence, the body at its most vulnerable – Lowery creates poems that both interpret the visual and move away from it into new narratives. Rego Retold is a fascinating exploration of the interplay of word and image; it is also a poet’s personal tribute to one of the most significant artists of our time.