Eliza and the Bear (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Rees, Eleanor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844717852 ISBN 13: 9781844717859

Publisher: Salt, 2011

Synopsis

Eleanor Rees’s first collection, Andraste’s Hair was shortlisted for Best First Collection in the 2007 Forward Prizes and for the 2008 Glen Dimplex Poetry Award. In her second full-length collection she continues to play the role of mythologiser and tale teller, moving away from her previous subject, the imagined city, into the magical psyches of changeling creatures.

In powerful nocturnal encounters silent visitors travel from the dark world, take on elemental form and embrace Rees’s narrators with sensual and erotic urgency. Laced with tales of physical transformations, Rees’s use of fairy stories and night visions radically reimagines the female experience through the psychic collisions of the body and our desires.

Eliza and the Bear offers a man who gives birth, trees that sing, a dissolving house, a woman trapped in walls, a peasant farmer in his barren fields, the wife of a Victorian botanist who longs for a child while her husband ‘discovers’ the new world, winter songs and red hot hearths: mysterious forces which have their home within us all.

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.

The Winter’s Mouth

I suck it up

into bone joint cold.

I suck it up into

deep damp lungs.

The thick stone holds

an inland sea.

The pressure of the cold

will swallow me whole.

I try to prevent it

sprinting into the evening,

heart blood thumping

on a chest wall cavity

as the night falls

and the city’s lights

cut out in an instance

as my thoughts cut out mid-sentence

I dwell around my bones

and breathing heart

in a high wind from the sea,

in a crush of cloud up above.

This is what I find here –

I speak with the winter’s mouth.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844717852
• ISBN 13: 9781844717859
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 72