Eleanor Rees’s first collection, Andraste’s Hair was shortlisted for Best First Collection in the 2007 Forward Prizes and for the 2008 Glen Dimplex Poetry Award. In her second full-length collection she continues to play the role of mythologiser and tale teller, moving away from her previous subject, the imagined city, into the magical psyches of changeling creatures.In powerful nocturnal encounters silent visitors travel from the dark world, take on elemental form and embrace Rees’s narrators with sensual and erotic urgency. Laced with tales of physical transformations, Rees’s use of fairy stories and night visions radically reimagines the female experience through the psychic collisions of the body and our desires. Eliza and the Bear offers a man who gives birth, trees that sing, a dissolving house, a woman trapped in walls, a peasant farmer in his barren fields, the wife of a Victorian botanist who longs for a child while her husband ‘discovers’ the new world, winter songs and red hot hearths: mysterious forces which have their home within us all.
Eleanor Rees is the author of Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Awards, Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009), Blood Child (Liverpool University Press/Pavilion, 2015) and a long pamphlet Riverine (Gatehouse Press, 2015). Eleanor received a Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry 2018. Eleanor is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope University and lives in Liverpool. www.eleanorrees.info
MermanChangelingSpillageOn an August MidnightWalking the AvenuesDreaming of the winter’s mouthThe KnockingThe Earth HouseThe Winter’s MouthA Flower Dipped in InkFlightEnclosureMaterialEliza and the Bear
Eleanor Rees's debut collection offers up a heartfelt hymn to her native Liverpool. Her dense, textured renderings of its landscapes are eloquent, but it is her importunate, ambiguous relationship with the city that provides these poems with their drive. She is at once possessor and possessed: bestriding the rooftops like a descendent of Whitman one moment, breaking "the top from the cathedral . . . oozing steam/ cream"; diminished and vulnerable, "tarmac . . . biting at my ankles", the next.
Margaret Murphy, Ramsey Campbell, James Friel, Brian Patten, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Clive Barker, Tracy Aston, Dinesh Allirajah, Paul Farley, Eleanor Rees, Maria Crossan
Margaret Murphy, Ramsey Campbell, James Friel, Brian Patten, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Clive Barker, Tracy Aston, Dinesh Allirajah, Paul Farley, Eleanor Rees, Maria Crossan