Eliza and the Bear

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.