Eleanor Rees

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Biographical note:  Eleanor Rees was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1978. Her pamphlet collection Feeding Fire received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002. She works in the community as a poet, running writing workshops for The Windows Project and also teaches in higher education. Eleanor is a member of the Word Hoard, Huddersfield and often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists. She lives in Liverpool.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713042
ISBN:  9781844713042
Author:  Eleanor Rees
Title:  Andraste’s Hair
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-07
Extent:  80pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  5 mm
Weight:  120 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  SHORT-LISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS BEST FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE (FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY 2007) Bridging the divide between experimental, performance and traditional poetries the poems in Andraste’s Hair draw on myth, memory, folksong and murder ballad. Often set in a mythical Liverpool, a city of metamorphosis and magic, grotesque and beautiful, its buildings are a backdrop for visions and apprehensions of the past. Liverpool at night is a place where boundaries are crossed in search of knowledge, sexual, historical, and emotional – between life and death.

Natural and urban landscapes – woodland, city park, dock, terraced street, the river, provide settings for an exploration of the conflict between instinctive and cultured knowledge, between abstract thought and felt experience. The poems are active and forceful – looking for answers they never find. Realities are established and than subverted. Women become trees, cities become men, roads become rivers, night becomes dawn, and the world is constantly transformed, constantly in flux.

Collaborative processes inform the structure of many poems; fusion and the loss of self are preoccupying themes. The poetic voice is remade to articulate what has been discovered in the act of writing. Sometimes erotic, sometimes fierce, sometimes vulnerable the poems fuse a musical sense of language with a grounded vision of the world.

Meet the author

Table of contents:
Night Vision
Roadworks
A Red Moon
Night River
Seams of Dust
The Clock Tower
Headlights
Parkland
Andraste’s Hair
The Fair
Or snow
Mermaid
Working the Land
Olwyn’s Valley
July
Body
Castle Hill
Tell me something of this
Wolf
Sky God Thunder
August
Flood
Winter Dawn
Rain-naked
Circle
On shore
A Nocturnal Opera

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Excerpt from book:  

Night River

East to west, west to east,
wetness crawls

the promenade wall.
Oil and chemical, salt and tar:

the night is in my throat.

I consume distances
at the edge of the river,

three am, solitary
held only by the rain and the sky.

The wind’s touch is courageous.

The stars are stags,
antlers pointed at each new shore

sailors discover
far from here, in some sunny waters.

I open to it like a mouth

and sense her shining
full height on the horizon,

as if the horizon is a ledge
she balances upon,

and hovering I rush to her,
her starriness, her electric pulses

that beckon, she widens:

I immerse myself in her thighs.
Her whiteness, her size.

I am her: the sea is a boat.
We ride until the dawn.

Unpublished endorsement :  Eleanor Rees comes from ‘over the water’, and her poems seem to issue from a lyric country where they do things differently. Instinctive, elemental, limber and ready for anything, they twist and coil marvellously between inner and outer worlds, never resting for long in either, always beguiling or unsettling the reader.

Paul Farley

Unpublished endorsement :  Eleanor Rees’s first full-length collection introduces an ambitious, experimental voice, vibrantly charged with the energy of city life.

Carol Ann Duffy