Description
Book SynopsisPauline 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). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her ninth collection Sleeping under the Juniper Tree are minimal but highly charged - with presences and hauntings, sensing the spirit incarnate in every part of the living world.
Trade ReviewOver 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
Table of ContentsElijah sleeping under the juniper tree Bach after dark Alchemist in search of a voice Nativity with beehives The marvellous blemish Percussion Hindsight At the mind's edge Pompeii Burial The control room Shaman's mirror Water-mirror The library of water Closure The glass cloud Spirit-level Lone surfer The stilling John Donne arriving in heaven Fantasia upon one note Lute-maker in a north light Frankenstein on Orkney The jade quarry Japanese acrobats at the Crystal Palace A step to the Japanese garden The bamboo theatre May The nine of hares The Copse The brazen foxes White doe Spring snow Inner garden A place between places The anxiety of sunlight Borderland The Rosary Quay The invisible year The convention Snowfall in Babylon Forest with mistletoe Resource Rewilding Avoriaz Aftermath After Gerhard Richter The shape of forgetting The Mondaytown bat Accidentals The leavening Afterlife Prophecy
