Suzannah V Evans online book launch with Eleanor Rees

Liverpool-based poet Eleanor Rees will be reading at the online launch of Suzannah V Evans’s new pamphlet Brightwork, out on 5 May with Guillemot Press, publishing Eleanor’s own next collection in 2022.

Suzannah V Evans’ watery-inspired, word-led poetry also features in the recently published Carcanet anthology New Poetries VIII, edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe at the Manchester-based press.

As guest poet for the event, Eleanor promises to read new poems written over the last year – a taster, perhaps, of her fifth collection of poems, following up from The Well At Winter Solstice, which received a Northern Writers’ Award in 2018 and was published by Salt in 2019. A senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope University, Eleanor Rees lives in Liverpool, having moved across the water from Birkenhead, where she was born.

Her poetry is described as “visionary” and “immerses you in another world from which you leave transformed”. Her debut pamphlet, Feeding Fire (Spout, 2001), received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 while her first full-length collection, Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize For Best First Collection and the Irish Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award. Her second collection, also with Salt, was 2009’s Eliza And The Bear while her third collection, Blood Child (Pavilion), was published the same year, 2015, as her long pamphlet Riverine (Gatehouse). Selections of her poems have been translated into French, German, Lithuanian, Slovak and Spanish (Versopolis, 2016, 2019), and philosopher Rosi Braidotti says: “These 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.”

Following on from her debut double pamphlets Marine Objects / Some Language published with Guillemot Press in April 2020, and illustrated by Chloe Bonfield, Suzannah V Evans’ new pamphlet Brightwork is also informed by time spent at Bristol’s historic boatyard Underfall Yard, where she was its first poet in residence, in 2019. Some Language takes the sea as its starting point, with poems set by shorelines, inside creaking boats, and balanced above rockpools, looking closely at the life found in these places. Based on the artist Eileen Agar’s sculpture Marine Object (1939), Marine Objects is an ekphrastic sequence of poems that unfold via repetition and the gradual development of language, lines, sound and themes, and which poet Isabel Galleymore describes as to be “marvelled at”. Suzannah V Evans’ watery-inspired, word-led poetry also features in the recently published Carcanet anthology New Poetries VIII, edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe at the Manchester-based press, and well worth a look, featuring the work of over 20 writers, including Victoria Kennefick.

Suzannah V Evans has published poems in PN Review, Eborakon, The London Magazine, The Scotsman, Magma, New Welsh Review, Stand and elsewhere. She was longlisted for the 2019 and 2018 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment, which she won in 2020, when she also received a 2020 Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North. She has read at Keats House, London, where she organised Keats House: New Poets, for York Literature Festival and StAnza Poetry Festival, and her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol. She is reviews editor for The Compass, a reviewer for the TLS and an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher at Durham University.