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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...

I am standing in a parallelogram of shrubbery outside London City Airport Ed is twisting a dial on his Mamiya RZ67 and squinting into its viewfinder He is wearing a Berghaus anorak, as standard, with a beanie hat, hiking boots and a flannel shirt His breath is clouding up around his face The camera’s lens is pointing at a factory in the distance, a complex heap of blocks and towers known locally as Sugar Mountain, officially as Tate & Lyle It rises abruptly at the end of the residential street, a gargantuan prison-like structure that might have functioned as a set for the film adaptation of 1984 had they not used the ruinous Beckton Gas Works a few miles east of here It is an architecturally hermetic building, anxious to preserve the final vestige of industrial productivity in an otherwise idle landscape Directly in front of us is a two-lane arterial road Cars zip past like urgent telegrams Every surface has been designed to enclose, repel or separate There are wooden fences embedded in concrete troughs There are concrete bridges and glass walls There are barriers, railings and painted lines—   ‘Excuse me? You’re not allowed to take pictures here!’   We turn to see a man in a hi-vis vest His nylon shirt is of that municipal noncolour that sits somewhere between turquoise and grey An ID card hangs from a branded lanyard at his neck   The best thing to do in situations like these is ignore the non-threats, take the photograph you’ve come to take and defend that tiny patch of civil freedom from the powers that seek to invade The official seems reluctant to break the invisible screen that separates the designated walking space from the decorative shrubs in which we stand It isn’t long before he strides forth, stepping through the plants in standard-issue boots, to reiterate his demands     * Consciously structured to minimise friction, slowness and delay, airports are places of social and spatial control Their architecture tends towards the abstraction of geometry, lines, lanes, parabolas and arcs; grids across which the traveller moves like a mathematical function Passengers

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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feature

October 2011

The White Review No.3 Editorial

The Editors

feature

October 2011

In the course of putting three issues of The White Review together, the editors have been presented with the...

Interview

December 2016

Interview with Caragh Thuring

Harry Thorne

Interview

December 2016

When I first visited Caragh Thuring in her east London studio, there was an old man lurking in the...

feature

Issue No. 14

In Search of the Dice Man

Emmanuel Carrère

TR. Will Heyward

feature

Issue No. 14

Towards the end of the 1960s, Luke Rhinehart was practicing psychoanalysis in New York, and was sick and tired...

 

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