Eleanor Rees reads live from her new Portent and Portals: New and Selected Poems, a book which gathers a body of work written over three decades exploring post-industrial edgelands, cityscapes, parks and gardens, estuaries and shorelines, margins and peripheries, real and otherworlds.
Drawing from five collections, out-of-print pamphlets and presenting new poems written with the Wirral peninsula, the selection also includes many collaborations, commissioned and participatory poems emerging from her ongoing practice as a local poet responding to place and communities with vivid imagination and poetic craft. Rees will be joined by Luke Thompson, editor, writer and publisher from Guillemot Press, Cornwall who will give an insight into small press publishing and creative book design followed by a Q&A hosted by Dr Pauline Rowe to explore the significance of Selected poems in a writing life of a poet, the editorial process and the broader themes alive in Rees’s poetry.
About Eleanor Rees and Luke Thompson:
Luke Thompson is a writer and editor from Cornwall. As a writer, recent books include Domadomadoma-Blumblumblum: Conversations with Other Animals (Ortac Press, 2024), Treasures of Cornwall (Macmillan, 2023), and A Guillemot Guide to Very Small Press Publishing (Guillemot, 2022). As an editor, Luke has worked with publishers of all shapes and sizes, from the micro to the Big Five, across poetry, fiction and non-fiction. He is the founding co-editor of the award-winning Guillemot Press.
Eleanor Rees‘s New & Selected Poems gathers together a body of work spanning three decades, five collections and several pamphlets, along with a new sequence Five Breaths. It 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. Selections of her poems have been translated into Lithuanian, Slovak, French, German, Romanian and Spanish (Versopolis, 2016, 2019, 2024). Eleanor is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and a Northern Writers’ Award, and she is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Liverpool Hope University.
Image: Potents and Portals, fragment of the book cover