Maiden Speech by Eleanor Brown

Maiden Speech by Eleanor Brown

Maiden Speech was the debut collection by Eleanor Brown, a witty poet who writes powerfully of love, and hilariously of love's pitfalls, most notably in her much anthologised "girlfriend's revenge" poem, 'Bitcherel'. Shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Eleanor Brown's breathtaking début collection… she displays the sharp wit of a Molière, with graceful, cerebral rhymes that leave a bitter aftertasteEver insightful and enormously funny, she juxtaposes moving descriptions with killer punchlines. * Time Out *
Rarely have I read so refreshing and engaging a first collection. On display are wit, wordplay and an exhilarating flexibility of rhyme and rhythm. Alongside a barmaid's address to "the Lads" is a succulent celebration of a wedding-cake. Jaundiced Sirens laconically slide closing couplets in, like rapiers. A subtly sustained and cunningly crafted sonnet sequence, assessing an affair, comprises the last rites it abjures. Love's assumptions are laid bare after the manner of a female Catullus or Alceste. Mistress of the telling phrase, Eleanor Brown seems as joyously drawn to her themes, and their expression, "as music draws a dancer". -- Stewart Conn

Eleanor Brown was born in 1969 and lived in Scotland until the age of 12. She studied English Literature at York. After graduating she worked variously as a waitress, barmaid, legal secretary, and minutes secretary, to be able to work also as a poet and translator of poetry. In 2001-02 she was Creative Writing Fellow at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde. She now lives, works, writes, sings (alto) and dances (Argentine tango) in Sheffield. Her debut collection, Maiden Speech, published by Bloodaxe in 1996, was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She was one of the five poets featured in Bloodaxe’s 1997 New Blood promotion. Her second collection, White Ink Stains, was published by Bloodaxe in 2019. Two of her works for theatre were commissioned and produced by Inigo Theatre company: a verse adaptation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, performed at the Cockpit Theatre, London in 1997; and the first version of Frank Wedekind’s Franziska to be published in English, performed at the Gate Theatre, London, in 1998, and published by Oberon Books. More recently, in 2014 she led workshops for the University of Sheffield’s French department, on translating poems by Baudelaire and Gautier in the context of musical settings by Vierne and Berlioz to produce singable versions of the texts. Since 2013 she has worked with the support and sponsorship of the Reading Sheffield oral history project, a grant from which funded a writing week. Some of the poems in her forthcoming collection White Ink Stains were presented at the University of Roehampton’s 2016 Oral History Conference Beyond Text in the Digital Age? in a paper discussing voice in oral history and voice in poetry.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781852243517
ISBN 10	1852243511
Title	Maiden Speech
Author	Eleanor Brown
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Year published	1996-05-30
Number of pages	64
Prizes	Short-listed for Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1996
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.