Eliza and the Bear
Published on 14. May 2010
Book
Hardback
64 pages
978-1-84471-566-4 (ISBN)
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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. -- Sarah Crown * The Guardian * ... 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 * 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 ... an ambitious, experimental voice vibrantly charged with the energy of city life. -- Carol Ann Duffy 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 Rees's work is completely deserving of its shortlist position, even more so for a voice outside the mainstream. -- Ross Sutherland * Metro * 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 *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Not illustrated
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-84471-566-4 (9781844715664)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
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. Eleanor 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. Eleanor often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists and works to commission. She lives in Liverpool. www.eleanorrees.com
Content
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
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