Eleanor has a new collection of poems Blood Child forthcoming for Pavilion Poetry. For more on the this exciting new press see below.
Announcing Pavilion Poetry
Liverpool University Press is delighted to announce the introduction of a path-breaking new series of poetry books that celebrate risk-taking in the form while aiming to both challenge and delight readers.
Evolving out from the Press’ prestigious poetry criticism list and edited by Deryn Rees-Jones, award-winning poet and Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, Pavilion Poetry aims to seek out and publish all that is daring and relevant in contemporary poetry.
Launching in April 2015, the series will debut with three books from a trio of the United Kingdom’s most compelling poets. Small Hands, the debut collection from Mona Arshi, winner of the 2014 Manchester Poetry Prize and the Magma Poetry Competition in 2012, is a rich rumination on a variety of human experience: grief, pleasure, hardship, and tradition. While often lyrical, haunting, and uncanny, there is a gentle poignancy that sits alongside a political edge, marking her out as one of the most distinctive new voices writing today.
In Sarah Corbett’s verse-novel And She Was, time and narrative bend and interlock across a play of poetic forms to compose one story of love and loss. Corbett draws on Haruki Murakami’s fictional spell-making and the filmic neo-noir of Atom Agoyem and David Lynch to push poetic boundaries and deliver a work that asks us to renegotiate the ways we encounter and reconfigure ourselves. She is a past winner of an Eric Gregory Award and was previously shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Meanwhile, Blood Child is Eleanor Rees’s third full-length collection (her debut was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection). Here Rees hones and extends her startling use of language and imagery to enact the many aspects of change – fleeting, elusive or moored in a negotiation of the material world as she roams through the landscapes of self and city. The idea of generation is explored in all its possibilities, the ‘child’ and the ‘girl’ are recurrent motifs, immanent and on the threshold of a magical or imaginative transformation. Landscapes are crossed, swum, burrowed under or flown above; skins and edges are sheared or lost, new coverings found and remade. Rees’s poems ask how new routes can be forged across shifting terrain and she offers the emergent space of the imagination as the only answer.
Alison Welsby, Editorial Director at Liverpool University Press, said, “This new venture for the Press is an opportunity to highlight some of the most original voices in contemporary poetry. Led by one of this country’s finest poets, Pavilion Poetry is an obvious development for LUP, building on many decades as a leading publisher of poetry criticism.”
Series Editor Prof. Deryn Rees-Jones added, “The University of Liverpool has a long and illustrious tradition of being a home to poets. This new LUP series marks an exciting moment in the relationship between the Press and the Department of English’s Centre for New and International Writing. The poets we are publishing ask important questions about the contemporary world, and do so fearlessly and movingly. It is a huge privilege to be working with them and for their work to be at the heart of a Press that will continue to publish the very best in new writing. We think Pavilion Poetry will find its place among the top poetry publishing houses today.”
To view the Pavilion Poetry series page, please click here.
Keep up to date with the series by following Pavilion Poetry on Twitter: @PavilionPoetry
Liverpool University Press: www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk
Mona Arshi: www.monaarshi.com
Sarah Corbett: www.sarahcorbettpoet.wordpress.com
Eleanor Rees: www.eleanorrees.info
