Guest Feature – Ellie Rees – Patricia M Osborne

I’m delighted to welcome poet, Ellie Rees, to Patricia’s Pen for the first time, and in particular because she has just launched her poetry collection Modest Raptures with The Broken Spine. Ellie has come along to blog about her writing so without further ado, it’s over to Ellie.

My Writing

Ellie Rees

The compulsion to write, to seize and freeze a moment, was already there when I bought LETTS Desk Diary 1963 (pictured below.) I wanted to capture in prose – photograph with words – what I called my ‘magic’ days, those intense adolescent ‘highs’. This habit persisted beyond my Adrian Mole period but if I open one of my journals from ten or even thirty years ago I am startled by how close they are in content, technique, even mood, to the poems I am writing now.

There is one obvious difference though. Before I studied for an MA in Creative Writing it never occurred to me that I could, or would want to create poetry of my own. Poetry was something written by someone else to be read for pleasure, or studied, or taught.

For many years I taught poetry to teenagers from all over the world who were studying for the International Baccalaureate. I still remember the time I issued a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry to a class of students who had never heard of her. There was silence at first as they opened their books and then just the sound of their sharp intakes of breath. That was magic – a different sort of magic from my younger days but one that made me decide to write my own.

My first collection, Ticking was published in 2021 by Hedgehog Poetry Press. It is a deep-mapping of a small stretch of the South Wales coastline and is structured as a walk. My second book is different. Modest Raptures is designed to slip into a pocket, to be dipped into. From the Twelfth Night after one Christmas to the ‘findings’ discovered on a visit twelve months later, a year is explored.

There are dancing pigeons, skylarks and sea gulls and a woodpecker suffering from concussion. Time is measured in swallows, while we listen with rapture to the modest song of a thrush at twilight.

There are secretive yew trees, trees that sing, an ash tree disguised as an oak, lines of trees, fallen trees, those that can hum hymns and the ones on the horizon that measure the sun’s royal progress.

The sun and its seasons affect almost every poem whether it is ‘blaring sunlight’ or ‘low and unremarkable’. There are ‘days when it hardly ever gets light’ or times when it ‘shatters leaves like glass’.

At the end of the year, forced indoors once more, modest raptures can still be felt.

About Ellie Rees

Ellie Rees is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet who lives on the coast of South Wales. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University. Ellie writes across many genres including creative non-fiction, memoir and poetry. Her work is published in journals such as The New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, The Lonely Crowd, Black Bough Poetry and The Broken Spine.

Her first collection of poetry, ‘Ticking’ won Hedgehog Poetry’s Selected or Neglected competition in 2020 and was published in 2021. Her second book. ‘Modest Raptures’ won The Broken Spine’s inaugural Chap Book Competition in 2022. It will be published in September 2023.