A review of The Well at Winter Solstice has been published in Poetry Wales 55.2. Anna Lewis offers an insightful and distinctive reading of the collection.
‘The passage is atmospheric enough to make the reader shiver, its slow syllables pre-empting the clock which, as it chimes the hours, seems in Rees’s phrasing to count the children’s sad, short lives down into the ground. Here the poetry is tender and affecting, while elsewhere the faceless apparitions Rees conjures can be truly chilling.’
Recent Readings 2020
During February and early March 2020, Eleanor was pleased to be able to read her poetry at several UK poetry events and festivals.
Alongside Helen Tookey, Eleanor read at the University of Bangor on 19th Feb and with Zoe Skoulding at the Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool on 20th Feb.
On 1st March, Eleanor was invited to read her poems as part of the Salt Poets/Live Canon reading at the Boulevard Theatre, Soho, London.
On 7th March travelled north to St Andrews for a reading with Oli Hazzard at Stanza International Poetry Festival.
In winter 2019, Eleanor collaborated with leading folk musicians Emily Portman and Mikey Kenney to create a programme of readings, traditional tunes and new musical settings of Eleanor’s poems by Emily and Mikey. The poems ‘Imbolc’, ‘Hearth-fire’, ‘Samhain’ and ‘Dialogue with Penmon Cross’ are now poem-songs. The poems continue to transform!
Photo: Mikey Kenney and Eleanor Rees
This special event was held on winter solstice 2019 in the intimate and unusual space of Ullet Road Unitarian Church, Liverpool. As well as a beautiful acoustic, the room has a vaulted painted ceiling and is lined with books. There was also an open fire.
Photo: Eleanor sound checks under the painted ceiling
The programme was a development of work begun for the book launch on summer solstice and Emily and Mikey are hatching plans to take this programme to other evocative venues. As one audience member said, ‘the event really helped me to understand Eleanor’s poems further and their connections to folklore and story-telling traditions’.
More to follow!
In November 2019, Eleanor was commissioned to write a new poem for the handover event from Wirral Borough of Culture to Sefton Borough of Culture.
On an atmospheric and chilly evening at Crosby Coastal Park the duologue, ‘Come to us through the Night’, was read by young people from Wirral and Sefton, prior to the turning on of the light installation, ‘Constellations’.
Eleanor has a poetics prose non-fiction piece in the new issue of Lune, The Journal of Literary Misrule.
To read it see here: https://lunejour
Eleanor is interviewed for the online Versopolis Review.
Read it here: https://www.versopolis-poetry.com/news/396/collaboration-makes-writing-more-democratic
Eleanor has written a short article for Poetry Wales on ‘How I write a Poem’.
Read it here
https://poetrywales.co.uk/eleanor-rees-on-how-she-writes-a-poem/
Watch a short film of Eleanor Rees reading ‘Bridie’s Tomb’ from The Well at Winter Solstice.
Filmed on location at St James Gardens by Jane Farley.
Eleanor launched her fourth collection The Well at Winter Solstice in St Bride’s Church on summer solstice, 21st June 2019.
The event was attended by over fifty people and received enthusiastic reviews with audience members commenting on the atmospheric venue and the evocative qualities of Eleanor’s poetry.
Folk musicians Emily Portman and Mikey Kenney set two of Eleanor’s poems to music, ‘The Bone’s Lament’ and ‘Imbolc’. A taster of these beautiful interpretations can be seen https://www.facebook.com/emilygportman/videos/2277640089231967/
Eleanor was fortunate to be invited to Paris in May 2019 to read her poetry as part of the Versopolis programme alongside leading European poets, Andreas Unterweger (Austria), Ivan Hristov (Bulgaria) and Luljeta Lleshanaku (Albania).
Readings took place at the National Centre for Books and in a medieval cellar near the Sorbonne!
Eleanor’s poems were translated French by Linda Maria Baros and published in a beautiful pamphlet.
A selection of Eleanor’s poems are translated into German as part of the EU funded Versopolis programme.
Eleanor travelled to Austria in April, 2019 to read at the International Literary Festival Literatur and Wein alongside Marija Andrijaseevic (Croatia), Jacobe Mansztajn (Poland) and Vladimir Durisic (Macedonia).
Photo Copyright: S. Waldecker/Literaturhaus NÖ.
A new review of Blood Child and Riverine has appeared in international literary journal, Tears in the Fence 169. Written by poet and academic Sean Street, the review engages with Eleanor’s poetics and her poetic project as a whole. Here are two quotes taken from a longer review.
“Yet it seems likely that only a place with the character of Liverpool, and its history of arrivals, leavings, history and cultural diversity could breed such richly imaginative, allusive and unique poetry as this. The trains come and go at the bottom of the garden, everything seems normal, current, scheduled, but in the park, behind manicured flowerbeds, standing stones older than the pyramids brood, and always, always there is the Mersey, wide, tidal and haunted by invisible lost ships; nowhere can be fixed and static when water flows through it. Thus while the city of which she writes is real, solid, material, it is also fluid, flexing and indeterminate, dreamlike as it filters through her consciousness and into the poems. Rees’s best work is hallucinogenic; like Powys, the ‘localness’ in her writing is overlaid with more than ‘universal’ connections, and it melts place and universe together in a way that disconcerts the reader”
and from later in the review,
‘Together, Blood Child and Riverine convey seductively cross-fading time-scapes; it is in the end this quality that makes these remarkable poems linger in the memory, unsettling and disquieting, redefining so-called realities. Dark, visceral, her use of language and image is controlled and concentrated, and through it the message is one of connection. World and human personality are intimately woven together; we are not observers of the game but part of it, belonging to the continuum. It comes down to time, the context through which we move; past and present occupy the same space within Rees’s theory of relativity, and chronology for her is measured both in every day and cosmic terms, just as local and universal, yesterday, today and tomorrow brush against one another, with us –rushing but static– in their midst.’
– Sean Street, Tears in the Fence
