Cornelia Gräbner speaks to Merseyside poet Eleanor Rees.

‘Come in,’ you say, ‘Come in,’ but when I
place my palm on the handle, I push into air,

and you are calling, not unkindly, ‘O do come in,’

as I search in the leaves for a key, to solidify
walls, to make the barrier more convincing.

(Eleanor Rees, ‘Tam Lin of the Winter Park’)

Eleanor Rees and myself are sitting in Sudley House, overlooking Sudley Park and the Mersey, across to the Wirral. Beyond it, the outlines of Welsh mountains are finely drawn on the horizon. A few months ago, Eleanor launched her most recent poetry collection Tam Lin of the Winter Park here at Sudley House, in the Walled Garden, at an event themed around ‘otherworlds’ with folk musician Emily Portman. And almost 30 years ago, Eleanor had her first job interview in this same building, at the age of 16.

Sudley Park is also where Eleanor wrote most of the poems collected in Tam Lin. During lockdown, she came every day because it was the quiet and secluded park closest to her house. During this rigid time period when everyday life was strictly circumscribed and many of us felt trapped, she decided to explore the sense of permeability that is special to some places. ‘People have always said that my poetry is kind of otherworldly’, Eleanor says, ‘In this book, I tried to take this seriously.’ She set herself the challenge of writing one poem on each visit. She would choose a spot and remain there, in stillness, becoming present with and from within where she was. She might have stood under a group of trees which became the poem ‘Plural’, ‘By the Walled Garden’, by a ‘Cornflower’, next to the belfry with peregrines nesting in it, or by the ‘Old House’. The profound sense of connectedness with the ways in which time, matter, human activity, and non-human life came together transcended the imposed restrictions; without the social restrictions, Eleanor says, she could not have achieved this depth of co-existence with the locality and all the worlds and creatures in it.

Writing in situ and from within a locality, rather than about a place, is a poetic project of Eleanor’s. Her previous collection, The Well at Winter Solstice, was written around Bridie’s Well in Cathedral Gardens. Like her visits to Sudley Park, Eleanor’s visits to Cathedral Gardens were initially motivated by necessity: she needed a place she could visit frequently and with ease, considering how little time her breadwinning job as an academic allows for writing projects. The need to write from being present responds to Eleanor’s need to ground herself which, she says, ‘is so strong because of the way working life disconnects us, because of the presence of technology’. Being grounded in a familiar place allows her to go deeper, to immerse herself in the many worlds that co-exist in places like Sudley House or Cathedral Gardens, places which hold the past and the future within the present moment.

Sea-wind flings itself over the city
full-heartedly in a wide embrace.
Figures walk towards the mausoleum and then disappear.
Sun settles a little then runs into the cloud.
Children died. Five years. One. Gone.
The curl of the clock wrings the day dark.
(Bridie’s Tomb: August 2016, St James Cemetery, Liverpool)

‘Being present’ as a poet also means to interact with the human, social world. Growing up in the post-industrialized Wirral gave her a keen sense for the human need for meaningful work. She left the Wirral to go to university in Sheffield and East Anglia. When she returned to Liverpool after graduating, to write her first book, she became part of the collective world of the Windows Project and participated in workshops and mentoring programs. ‘I met poets who were doing all kinds of poetry in a very socially engaged way’, she remembers, ‘There was quite a large number of different performance poets, more political poets, who were all doing very excellent things, but in different ways to those that would have been valued at universities at the time… Liverpool had quite a distinctive character. Poetry wasn’t one or the other, you didn’t have to fit into a mold.’ At the same time, she worked with other creative collectives across the North, practising avant-garde techniques like performing with Jazz musicians, and to this day she travels abroad to meet poets at festivals and events. Liverpool has been a good place to be for her. There is a role for the poet and a general consensus that poetry is work that holds social value, and that the work of the imagination is work, not fancy, because it can modify or even remove the fabric of what we think of as ‘reality’. This is important for change and for dynamism, and it is how we discover and connect with alternatives to the way things are. Audiences have a big part to play in that, and Liverpool audiences respond to poetry in an unusual way: people tend to take poetry as a source of inspiration to look differently at the world, to be curious and open; there is no desire to turn ‘poetry’ into something that can be grasped, commodified, marketed, and owned; and there is no desire to be the expert-reader, to read poems just to feed one’s ego by evaluating and judging other people’s perceptions.

Eleanor’s poetic work is about imagining alternatives to the ways in which humans have traditionally conceived of themselves as being in control of space and time, of being separate from and superior to everything else. Even poetry has been written from that idea, with the voice of a poet who contemplates the world or writes about it, and can do that because they are apart from it. This view of ourselves is, for Eleanor, one of the causes of the planetary and social devastation we are facing today. She is interested in the philosophy of ‘post-humanism’, which holds that all life and matter on the planet are interconnected with each other. In that view and in that experience, we are never not present, because we always resonate with all other forms of life and of matter that together form this planet. And this way of being is what Eleanor imagines in her poems:

The heaviness fell into my arms, resisted,
as I tried to move into another shape,

like the weight it is, carried in my muscles’
salt, blood and gravity; daylight pinned

beneath the cloud – sometimes sharp,
sometimes kind – as I am bound to this spot,

turning my torso to receive the salted air.

O my ocean, do you still rush against the shore?
To be in you, to be sea-shorn, sea-blown,

wide, so wide, so wide, I cannot be lost.

(By the Walled Garden)