Description
Book SynopsisLawrence Sail's poems balance dream and history, delight and unease: they weigh the art of the possible against the encroachment of time. This substantial retrospective covers work written over four decades, drawing on poems from ten collections, from "Opposite Views" (1974) to the "New Poems" (2010) first collected in this volume. The new poems continue to explore Sail's characteristic themes - the border country between belief and doubt; the interplay of memory and imagination; the possibilities of art; the context of silence: and they do so with a fresh inwardness. Attentive to the often alluring details of the material and natural world, many of them reflecting the writer's love of the sea, the poems also contemplate the relationship between appearance and essence. The closing poem, 'Ghostings', offsets a keen awareness of the world as it is against the parameters of a child's perceptions and a quest for a vision of wholeness.
Trade Review'Beneath the elegance and refinement of Lawrence Sail's artistry is the ever-present undertow - the current below the aesthetic surface, moving in a contrary direction to that of the surface current, and it is this that gives the poems their authority and depth of vision' - Catherine Beeston, Critical Survey. 'There is a shimmering quality to Sail's sensibility which moves easily between sharply focused observations of the particulars of object and place, the play of light on the locally loved and known, and a constant alertness to larger climates and movements - close and subtle looking and a rich, playful use of language are the tools by which discoveries are made' - Peter Scupham, PN Review.
