Blood Child (Pavilion Poetry) - Softcover

Rees, Eleanor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781381801 ISBN 13: 9781781381809

Publisher: Pavilion Poetry, 2015

Synopsis

In her third full-length collection Blood Child, Eleanor 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Eleanor Rees is the author of Andraste's Hair (Salt, 2007), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards, and Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009). She often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists and works to commission. Eleanor has worked extensively as a local poet in the community. She lives in Liverpool.

Review:

"Eleanor Rees does with language what an origami master does with paper or a contortionist their own limbs: she teases and manipulates it into wondrous, strange, and alluring shapes. It's been several years since I've read work this stimulating, the engagement with which offering such profound peace and pleasure and such resonant rewards."--Niall Griffiths

"These poems are an exquisite unearthing of meaning in nature. They trace metamorphosis, find mind in everything, and suggest not so much what things look like to humans but what they feel like to themselves."--Jay Griffiths, author of Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape

"These are shape-shifting poems from a shape-shifting poet, who listens to what the place has to say and always keeps her feet on the ground."--Paul Kingsnorth

On Eleanor Rees's previous work:
"An ambitious, experimental voice vibrantly charged with the energy of city life."--Carol Ann Duffy, British Poet Laureate

On Eleanor Rees's previous work:
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. [...] Such imaginative freewheeling carries the risk of disorienting the reader, but the coherence provided by the location gives the poems vital integrity."--The Guardian

On Eleanor Rees's previous work: "Here is a poetry that relishes the chaotic and magical; trees and plants abandon gardens and start to move down the street, humans give birth to animals, houses come alive. Eleanor Rees's language is sensuous, unpredictable. The materials of folktale and border ballad are never far away."--The Guardian

On Eleanor Rees's previous work:
"Eleanor Rees's poetry is strikingly pleasing, its distinctive rhythms as insidious as water."--IPN Review

On Eleanor Rees's previous work: " I love the meaty, muscularity of the poems ... I caught the boat to Ireland from Liverpool recently and found myself remembering big chunks of the river poem as we chugged past the harbour bar."--Frank Cottrell Boyce

"If all poetry is an autobiography of the author's inner life, then Small Hands gives us a striking glimpse into how beautiful and troubling it is to be Mona Arshi [...] Redolent with the peculiar intimacies of family, and brimming with carefully-controlled and surprising imagery, Arshi gives us a book to return to--not to revise our intellectual understanding, but to slip into her skin."Huffington Post

"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 realisties. Dark, visceral, her use of language and image is controlled and concentrated, and through it the message is one of connection."
Sean Street, Tears in the Fence

About this edition

• Publisher: Pavilion Poetry
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1781381801
• ISBN 13: 9781781381809
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64