The Lady & the Hare: New & Selected Poems - Softcover

Stainer, Pauline

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852246324 ISBN 13: 9781852246327

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2003

Synopsis

Pauline Stainer is a poet `working at the margins of the sacred', conveying sensations `with an economy of means that is breathtaking... her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own' (John Burnside). The Lady & the Hare brings together poetry of rare luminosity from Pauline Stainer's five previous books, together with new poems, all inhabiting an imaginative borderland inspired by her `visceral Muse'. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

About this title

Review:

Over the past 20 years, Pauline Stainer has all but perfected the art of illumination without demystification, in search of what she calls "the divining shiver", a phrase that can only gesture towards the combination of physical immediacy and numinous wonder that her marvellous poems possess... Stroke by stroke, apprehension by apprehension, Stainer is building a unique and extraordinary body of work. -- Frances Leviston * Guardian * Her territory is predominantly that of legend: its symbols and its creatures - the unicorn, the falcon, the serpent - but she often draws them into a contemporary setting where they neither shed power nor lose meaning. Her purpose is not so much to import the ancient world into the modern as to demonstrate that those worlds are of a piece: that old rituals still obtain, that old beliefs still govern instinct. -- David Harsent * PBS Bulletin * Pauline Stainer writes sacred poetry for the scientific twenty-first century. Her poetry preserves a surety of vision, insisting that belief can only increase with knowledge, and that wisdom and faith are still provinces of careful, crystalline language. She is deeply English and draws from a wealth of sources: medieval lyrics, Eastern as well as Western art, Christian liturgy, and an impressive familiarity with chemistry and optics. -- Anne Stevenson

About the Author:

Pauline Stainer is a freelance writer and tutor. After many years in rural Essex and then on the Orkney island of Rousay, she spent a number of years in rural Suffolk. She now lives near Saffron Walden. Her nine poetry titles, all of which have been published by Bloodaxe Books, include The Lady & the Hare: New & Selected Poems (2003), which draws on five previous books, as well as a new collection, A Litany of High Waters. Her three subsequent collections are Crossing the Snowline (2008), Tiger Facing the Mist (2013) and Sleeping under the Juniper Tree (27 April 2017). Along with The Lady & the Hare, her collections The Honeycomb, Sighting the Slave Ship and The Ice-Pilot Speaks were all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her fourth collection The Wound-dresser's Dream was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award in 1996. Pauline Stainer received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry in 2009.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1852246324
• ISBN 13: 9781852246327
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192