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 and her first full length collection Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards. Rees works in the community as a poet, running writing workshops for The Windows Project and is also a part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists and works to commission. She lives in Liverpool.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715664
ISBN:  9781844715664
Author:  Eleanor Rees
Title:  Eliza and the Bear
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Nov-09
Extent:  64pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  96 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  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.

Main description:  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.

Table of contents:
Merman
Changeling
Spillage
On an August Midnight
Walking the Avenues
Dreaming of the winter’s mouth
The Knocking
The Earth House
The Winter’s Mouth
A Flower Dipped in Ink
Flight
Enclosure
Material
Eliza and the Bear

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Excerpt from book:  

The Winter’s Mouth

I suck it up
into bone joint cold.

I suck it up into
deep damp lungs.

The thick stone holds
an inland sea.

The pressure of the cold
will swallow me whole.

I try to prevent it
sprinting into the evening,

heart blood thumping
on a chest wall cavity

as the night falls
and the city’s lights

cut out in an instance
as my thoughts cut out mid-sentence

I dwell around my bones
and breathing heart

in a high wind from the sea,
in a crush of cloud up above.

This is what I find here —
I speak with the winter’s mouth.

Unpublished endorsement:  This is a strongly contemporary voice, but always on the edges of myth, dream, fairy-tale. The title sequence is remarkable: a sustained piece of dramatic-poetic writing, a tour-de-force.

Michael Symmons Roberts

Previous review quote:  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. Her urban-pastoral language strongly recalls Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow, Tobias Hill's London collection of last year, but Rees's responses to Liverpool are freer, more impressionistic. A park's "benches" and "trees" are overlaid with ghosts of the city's seafaring past, the "you" of the poem "mending ship's sails on the dilapidated bandstand"; in other poems the city is "ruled by wolves" or devoured by its citizens, "gnawing at bricks … /Gobbling cornice like icing". Such imaginative freewheeling carries the risk of disorienting the reader, but the coherence provided by the location gives the poems vital integrity.

Sarah Crown
The Guardian

Previous review quote:  … incantatory, spell-like, trance-inducing – poetry as magical utterance to which you have to submit, make a willing suspension of disbelief …

Matt Simpson
Stride magazine

Previous review quote:  I love the meaty, muscularity of the poems in this collection. It’s not often you read something engaged with urban life that is intense and personal, rather than sociological and fashionable

Frank Cotterell Boyce

Previous review quote:  … an ambitious, experimental voice vibrantly charged with the energy of city life.

Carol Ann Duffy

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

Paul Farley

Previous review quote:  Rees’s work is completely deserving of its shortlist position, even more so for a voice outside the mainstream.

Ross Sutherland
Metro

Previous review quote:  Rees comes close to describing the nature of her vision when she writes ‘marrow is all my thinking // as thinking is tired and broken / has no cohesion … thinking thinks too much of itself’. As ‘marrow’ suggests, the core of experience is deep and hidden, and in the romantic-expressionist tradition it is this deep apprehension, not the processes of conscious thought, that most compel her … lusciously, swooningly female in the restless, mobile eroticism that flows throughout the book … The expressionist character of Rees’ work is bold and demanding. She offers nothing that is cheaply mimetic or demotic.

Jeffrey Wainwright
PN Review