Eleanor will be reading from her forthcoming third collection Blood Child (Pavilion, 2015). Many of her poems explore the peninsula landscape of the Wirral and its local history presenting place as a continual process of re-imagining.
4th December, 7- 9pm. £4.00
Eleanor has a feature essay in the new online issue of The Lighthouse Literary Journal ‘Dusk Town’ and ‘Congleton Tapestry’: ‘Writing With Small Towns’.
If you are interested in finding out more about the POETRY FIELDS writing workshop programme as it develops sign up here.
Eleanor has a new collection of poems Blood Child forthcoming for Pavilion Poetry. For more on the this exciting new press see below.
Announcing Pavilion Poetry
Liverpool University Press is delighted to announce the introduction of a path-breaking new series of poetry books that celebrate risk-taking in the form while aiming to both challenge and delight readers.
Evolving out from the Press’ prestigious poetry criticism list and edited by Deryn Rees-Jones, award-winning poet and Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, Pavilion Poetry aims to seek out and publish all that is daring and relevant in contemporary poetry.
Launching in April 2015, the series will debut with three books from a trio of the United Kingdom’s most compelling poets. Small Hands, the debut collection from Mona Arshi, winner of the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize and the Magma Poetry Competition in 2012, is a rich rumination on a variety of human experience: grief, pleasure, hardship, and tradition. While often lyrical, haunting, and uncanny, there is a gentle poignancy that sits alongside a political edge, marking her out as one of the most distinctive new voices writing today.
In Sarah Corbett’s verse-novel And She Was, time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms to compose one story of love and loss. Corbett draws on Haruki Murakami’s fictional spell-making and the filmic neo-noir of Atom Agoyem and David Lynch to push poetic boundaries and deliver a work that asks us to renegotiate the ways we encounter and reconfigure ourselves. She is a past winner of an Eric Gregory Award and was previously shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Meanwhile, Blood Child is Eleanor Rees’s third full-length collection (her debut was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection). Here Rees hones and extends her startling use of language and imagery to enact the many aspects of change – fleeting, elusive or moored in a negotiation of the material world as she roams through the landscapes of self and city. The idea of generation is explored in all its possibilities, the ‘child’ and the ‘girl’ are recurrent motifs, immanent and on the threshold of a magical or imaginative transformation. Landscapes are crossed, swum, burrowed under or flown above; skins and edges are sheared or lost, new coverings found and remade. Rees’s poems ask how new routes can be forged across shifting terrain and she offers the emergent space of the imagination as the only answer.
Alison Welsby, Editorial Director at Liverpool University Press, said, “This new venture for the Press is an opportunity to highlight some of the most original voices in contemporary poetry. Led by one of this country’s finest poets, Pavilion Poetry is an obvious development for LUP, building on many decades as a leading publisher of poetry criticism.”
Series Editor Prof. Deryn Rees-Jones added, “The University of Liverpool has a long and illustrious tradition of being a home to poets. This new LUP series marks an exciting moment in the relationship between the Press and the Department of English’s Centre for New and International Writing. The poets we are publishing ask important questions about the contemporary world, and do so fearlessly and movingly. It is a huge privilege to be working with them and for their work to be at the heart of a Press that will continue to publish the very best in new writing. We think Pavilion Poetry will find its place among the top poetry publishing houses today.”
To view the Pavilion Poetry series page, please click here.
Keep up to date with the series by following Pavilion Poetry on Twitter: @PavilionPoetry
Liverpool University Press: www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Mona Arshi: www.monaarshi.com
Sarah Corbett: www.sarahcorbettpoet.wordpress.com
Eleanor Rees: www.eleanorrees.info
Eleanor had a great day recently leading poetry workshops for MMU in the ‘Edgelands’ of Crewe. Participants were asked to engage with the agency of all the objects in the space – that’s talking to stones and trees!
For more details and workshop exercises see here
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/detail/2014/Seminars/AH/GEN931_MMU
For an lovely account of the day by novelist, Jenn Ashworth see here
http://jennashworth.co.uk/2014/04/writing-and-landscape-at-mmu-crewe/
Born of a Liverpool taste for variety and drama, ‘Storm and Golden Sky’ offers literary high style from across the poetic landscape; experimental, lyric, performance and all that is in-between, and brings them, two at a time, hand by hand, into the city bounds for a reading series which revels in the intensities of our art.
Programmed by a collective of Liverpool-based poets, Michael Egan, Nathan Jones, Robert Sheppard and Eleanor Rees, we aim for a literary experience felt in your bones as juxtaposition and surprise correspondence. New metaphors will be forged, similarities caught, trajectories flown.
Invited poets will read for substantial half-hour sets introduced by new works from the collective.
Storm and Golden Sky tumblr
Next up 27th June Holly Pester and Evan Jones
18th July Niall Campbell and tbc
And monthly thereafter…
Readings start at 7.00pm on the dot in the upstairs room of The Caledonia. £5 entry. And free mag! Arrive early to get drink and the best seats.
Eleanor is very pleased to be working on a new collaborative poem for performance with the artist and writer, Justin Coombes, for an event ‘Writing on Water’ in Oxford, May 14th 2014 at the Fordham Gallery, a 60ft x 12ft canal barge, travelling art gallery and residency for national and international artists moored on the Oxford Canal.
Next session Tues April 8th, 7-9 pm
Tues 8th
Thurs 17th
Then tuesday thereafter
Eleanor will be hosting a Writing Cafe at Cafe 81 Renshaw Street.
The session is for all writers and will be primarily practice-based with Eleanor leading a range of creative writing games and exercises to stimulate your imagination. Perfect for developing an ongoing writing project, finding time in the day to focus on your writing or just having fun making things up! There will also be sharing of work-in-progress and close readings of poems and prose.
The notion is to run a writing workshop like a dance, yoga or life drawing class with the focus on learning through doing! Eleanor is an experienced writing workshop tutor specialising in creativity. She has taught in HE and is currently working on a PhD, ‘Re-imagining the Local Poet’.
The cafe will stay open for 15 mins at the start of the class for tea,coffee,cake etc which may well be needed on these cold winter nights.
£6..00/5.00 concession per class, sessions ongoing through Jan. Dates will alter in February.
You can drop-in on the night but if you are coming do let Eleanor know if you can make it and for more details reeseleanor@hotmail.com or https://www.facebook.com/events/543356339079942/?ref_dashboard_filter=calendar
http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/online/the-magic-and-metamorphosis-of-metaphor.php
A new online poetry course with Eleanor running in the New Year. xx
‘Eliza and the Bear’, the book which became a performance, became a band, http://elizaandthebear.com, became well we’ll see… is now available in paperback!
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781844717859 and at other sites across the internet.
xx
Eleanor is pleased two new poems have found their way into the pages of this quality literary magazine. For more, to buy and details of the contents see
Eleanor will be giving a practice-based paper at this conference on the procedure and reconfiguration panel, on ‘Re-imagining the Local Poet’.
16th November, London
Next session 26th November, 7-9 pm Eleanor will be hosting a Writing Cafe at Cafe 81 Renshaw Street.
The session is for all writers and will be primarily practice-based with Eleanor leading a range of creative writing games and exercises to stimulate your imagination. Perfect for developing an ongoing writing project, finding time in the day to focus on your writing or just having fun making things up! There will also be sharing of work-in-progress and close readings of poems and prose.
The notion is to run a writing workshop like a dance, yoga or life drawing class with the focus on learning through doing! Eleanor is an experienced writing workshop tutor specialising in creativity. She has taught in HE and is currently working on a PhD, ‘Re-imagining the Local Poet’.
The cafe will stay open for 15 mins at the start of the class for tea,coffee,cake etc which may well be needed on these cold winter nights.
£6..00/5.00 concession per class, sessions ongoing until Christmas (excluding 5th and 19th Nov).
You can drop-in on the night but if you are coming do let Eleanor know if you can make it and for more details reeseleanor@hotmail.com or https://www.facebook.com/events/543356339079942/?ref_dashboard_filter=calendar
Eleanor is pleased to have two new poems ‘Mossley Hill’ and ‘In My Ears and In My Ears’ included in ‘The Clearing’.
THE CLEARING is an online magazine published by Little Toller Books that offers writers and artists a dedicated space in which to explore and celebrate the landscapes we live in. Our contributors are encouraged to go forth and find distinctive visions that startle us, rural or urban, modern or prehistoric, industrial, post-industrial, fantastical, natural, political, however they come. But each must be meaningful, surprising, felt. We welcome cross-fertilisations of genre and discipline, collaboration and innovation. We want to be inspired and challenged by cultures, practices and stories of places that may be going untold.
To read them see here
