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Eleanor Rees
Eleanor Rees is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent is The Well at Winter Solstice (Salt, 2019) and her fifth collection Tam Lin of the Winter Park, in which these poems will appear, is forthcoming from Guillemot Press in May, 2022. Eleanor is senior lecturer in creative writing at Liverpool Hope University and lives in Liverpool.

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Three Poems

Poetry

April 2022

Eleanor Rees

Poetry

April 2022

ESCAPE AT RED ROCKS   I am the colour of the outside, a stillness moving like a winter tide, a new shoreline in formation,...

poetry

September 2012

Mainline Rail

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

Back-to-backs, some of the last, and always just below the view   a sunken tide of regular sound west...

The limestone statue of the diamond trader, imperialist and racist Cecil Rhodes that adorns the façade of Oxford’s Oriel College (where only one Black British A-level student has been admitted since 2010) has an impossibly large head This kind of synecdochical oversizing of the head, and often the hands too, has a long heritage in classical sculpture: Michelangelo’s David is but one example A large head contains an expansive mind; large hands do great things Rhodes’s supersized finger points outwards and toward a prosperous future for the ‘finest race in the world’, which – according to him – was the Anglo-Saxon race But this hand also points downwards to where he would have fallen, had Oriel College not rejected campaigners’ call to remove the statue   To build individuals in stone is to ask the landscape to be forever defined by them To build individuals in stone is to submit to a belief in the unwavering infallibility of genius, of bravery, of accomplishment For many, tearing down statues is a Soviet thing, an Isis thing, a totalitarian-authoritarian thing; it is extreme, whereas Oxford, they think, is not   Nicolas Party, the Swiss artist whose site-specific installation Speakers is currently on show at Modern Art Oxford’s Piper Gallery, reads the city’s architecture as imbued with ‘a masculine energy’ In response, Party has sculpted five enormous women’s heads to acknowledge the work of the city’s notable women Two metres high and like milliner’s dummies, the heads were designed on 3D-printers before being fashioned from plaster and placed inside the small gallery, whose walls have been painted orange Vibrancy is Party’s strength: he is known for his bright, blobby still lifes and landscape paintings One head has a violet face and slick green hair, another is Pepto-Bismol pink with raspberry lips The women look out in different directions, and on closer inspection, their apparently neutral expressions admit boredom, wry amusement, incredulity   Speakers is based on the Emperor Heads, thirteen stone busts that encircle Oxford’s seventeenth-century Sheldonian Theatre The identities of the busts remain unknown, and while their laurel wreaths might make them philosophers or apostles, enigmatic Oxford

Contributor

August 2014

Eleanor Rees

Contributor

August 2014

Eleanor Rees is the author of four collections of poetry. Her most recent is The Well at Winter Solstice...

Crossing Over

poetry

September 2012

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

As he sails the coracle of willow and skins his bird eyes mirror the moon behind cloud. Spring tide drags west but he paddles...

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poetry

October 2014

Roman Nights

Martin Glaz Serup

TR. Christopher Sand-Iversen

poetry

October 2014

4.    It’s New Year’s Eve, I’m standing newly divorced on a roof in a town, we toast the...

feature

October 2013

A World of Sharp Edges: A Week Among Poets in the Western Cape

André Naffis-Sahely

feature

October 2013

In Antal Szerb’s The Incurable, the eccentric millionaire Peter Rarely steps into the dining car of a train steaming...

Interview

Issue No. 11

Interview with Alice Oswald

Max Porter

Interview

Issue No. 11

Alice Oswald is a British poet who lives in Devon with her family. Newspaper profiles will inevitably mention the...

 

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