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
