Andraste’s Hair (Salt Modern Poets) - Hardcover

Rees, Eleanor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1844713040 ISBN 13: 9781844713042

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

SHORT-LISTED FOR THE FELIX DENNIS BEST FIRST COLLECTION PRIZE (FORWARD PRIZES FOR POETRY 2007) Bridging the divide between experimental, performance and traditional poetries the poems in Andraste’s Hair draw on myth, memory, folksong and murder ballad. Often set in a mythical Liverpool, a city of metamorphosis and magic, grotesque and beautiful, its buildings are a backdrop for visions and apprehensions of the past. Liverpool at night is a place where boundaries are crossed in search of knowledge, sexual, historical, and emotional – between life and death.

Natural and urban landscapes – woodland, city park, dock, terraced street, the river, provide settings for an exploration of the conflict between instinctive and cultured knowledge, between abstract thought and felt experience. The poems are active and forceful – looking for answers they never find. Realities are established and than subverted. Women become trees, cities become men, roads become rivers, night becomes dawn, and the world is constantly transformed, constantly in flux.

Collaborative processes inform the structure of many poems; fusion and the loss of self are preoccupying themes. The poetic voice is remade to articulate what has been discovered in the act of writing. Sometimes erotic, sometimes fierce, sometimes vulnerable the poems fuse a musical sense of language with a grounded vision of the world.

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, Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009), Blood Child (Liverpool University Press/Pavilion, 2015) and a long pamphlet Riverine (Gatehouse Press, 2015). Eleanor received a Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry 2018. Eleanor is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope University and lives in Liverpool. www.eleanorrees.info

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Night River

East to west, west to east,
wetness crawls

the promenade wall.
Oil and chemical, salt and tar:

the night is in my throat.

I consume distances
at the edge of the river,

three am, solitary
held only by the rain and the sky.

The wind’s touch is courageous.

The stars are stags,
antlers pointed at each new shore

sailors discover
far from here, in some sunny waters.

I open to it like a mouth

and sense her shining
full height on the horizon,

as if the horizon is a ledge
she balances upon,

and hovering I rush to her,
her starriness, her electric pulses

that beckon, she widens:

I immerse myself in her thighs.
Her whiteness, her size.

I am her: the sea is a boat.
We ride until the dawn.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844713040
• ISBN 13: 9781844713042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80