Eleanor Rees at Open Eye Gallery Liverpool

Launching her shiny new volume of selected poems in Liverpool, where much of it was dreamed up, Eleanor Rees will be reading live and also chatting about the production and processes involved with her publisher Luke Thompson and fellow poet and Open Eye‘s associate writer, Dr Pauline Rowe.

Portents and Portals: New & Selected Poems gathers together a body of work spanning three decades and exploring post-industrial edgelands, cityscapes, parks and gardens, estuaries and shorelines, margins and peripheries, real and otherworlds. Drawing from five collections and several out-of-print pamphlets, and presenting a new sequence of poems, Five Breaths, written with the Wirral peninsula in mind, the selection also includes many collaborations, commissioned and participatory poems emerging from Eleanor Rees’s ongoing practice as a local poet responding to place and communities with vivid imagination and poetic craft. These, we’re told, are “poems written in a state of grace, trusting in the infinite wisdom of the universe. And Rees gives us hope that all manner of things shall be well in the end, if we are only able to shift our vision”.

Portents and Portals: New & Selected Poems follows Tam Lin of the Winter Park (Guillemot, 2022), The Well at Winter Solstice (Salt, 2019), Blood Child (Pavilion, 2015), Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009) and Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Eleanor is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and a Northern Writers’ Award, and she is a senior lecturer at Liverpool Hope University.

Former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy calls Eleanor Rees: “…an ambitious, experimental voice vibrantly charged with the energy of city life.” Penelope Shuttle says: “This poet offers the reader new and exact ways of articulating the power of place to mirror human longing, sorrow, and fidelity to emotional purpose.”

Rees will be joined by Luke Thompson, editor, writer and publisher of the Cornwall-based independent publishing house Guillemot Press that is behind the book “made with Arena, Sirio Flamingo and Wibalin Stria Old Gold papers” (we love this kind of detail!). Thompson (who you may have caught recently at Manchester Poetry Library) will give an insight into small press publishing and creative book design, and says Portents and Portals is: “a beautiful book – probably one of the most attractive we’ve made… It’s a hardback, very attractively presented with cover art by Rebecca Freeman.”

A Q&A will follow hosted by Dr Pauline Rowe, RLF Fellow for Reading Round in Liverpool and whose collection The Weight of Snow (Maytree Press, 2021) won a Saboteur award for best poetry pamphlet. She will be exploring the significance of ‘Selected’ volumes in a writing life of a poet, the editorial process and the broader themes alive in Rees’s poetry.