HELLO

Ellie Rees is a wordsmith of the finest order, conjuring images that stay with you long after the poem has been put aside. There are shades of Wordsworth and Coleridge here, from their Lyrical Ballad days, but whereas they now appear dated and stiff, these stunning poems from Ellie Rees are vivid and alive. I loved the personal touches which take the poems out of the traditional nature verse genre, giving what is seen and heard - and felt - an altogether deeper dimension. A wonderful collection, finely crafted with haunting lines and beautiful word pictures. As Coleridge said ‘The best words in the best order.’ Book of the year for me.
Phil Carradice, poet, historian and novelist.

Modest Raptures is available from Amazon @ £7.99

To order a signed copy of Modest Raptures, please contact Ellie directly: ellierees23@btinternet.com

Modest Raptures is in part a celebration of the natural world and in part an invitation. Through her Thomas Hardy like powers of observation, Rees enables us to experience her symbiotic relationship with the countryside and to share its sensory pleasures. She reveals an emotional connection with the environment that in the Twenty-First Century many of us have lost or do not have. Each season evokes a distinctive mood, a personal association, a precious memory. This world, however, is under threat, the cycle of the seasons has become less predictable, less dependable. Now ‘daffodils bloom/ before the unassuming snowdrops.’ Fields are clapped out.  Hedgerows have been destroyed and disorientated birds collide with windows. Fragile nature is in decline and time is running out. The fine, layered and resonant poems in Modest Raptures invite the reader to connect with our natural environment and treasure it before it is too late.
Nigel Kent, Poet and Reviewer

In Modest Raptures, sparrows squabble, pigeons dance, the leaves change colour and the skies throb with musicality. These poems demand to be digested.
Mari Ellis Dunning. Author of Pearl and Bone

The poems in Ticking deep map a beautiful but apparently empty strip of the South Wales coastline that looks across the Bristol Channel to Exmoor. The collection could be classified as nature writing, though the term, deep-mapping is a more accurate description of the eclectic subject matter: there are ghosts, suicides and ruins, as well as dung spiders, stone masons and insect apprehension. Many of the poems focus on the history and geography, archaeology and wild life of a two-mile stretch of the Welsh coastline. However, the mapping in Ticking is not only confined to the tangible or material, it includes the intangible, the dreams and hopes, imaginations and fears of its residents both in the past and in the present.

You can order a copy of Ticking from:
The Hedgehog Poetry Press | Amazon

To order a signed copy of Ticking please contact Ellie directly: ellierees23@btinternet.com

“Quietly, precisely, these poems stitch together several kinds of journey, though the seasons, through convalescence and a spirited response to one’s own ageing, through an intimately known locality, till the life of a person is linked with that of a place. Step by step, grounded in observation of the natural world, given lift by a delightful humour, they move from the confines of the house out through fields underlaid by history to the dizzying edge of the land and of geological time.”
Philip Gross

“Ticking is a quietly stunning collection. You read the poems with a growing sense of excitement which turns to a feeling of eerie glee. The sense of a poet finding her voice and vision is palpable… Wales has made another poet: her name is Ellie Rees.”
Horatio Clare