Search results for ""author lesley saunders""

This Thing of Blood & Love, Lesley Saunders’ fifth collection with Two Rivers Press, is an intense examination of human culpability, the secrets we half-keep from ourselves, the contradictory selves we inhabit, the histories that live on unreconciled in us, the planet whose imperfect stewards we are; and above all the unfathomable mystery of being (in) a body, incarnated, made flesh – a thing of blood and love that betrays us with its appalling vulnerabilities. The poems in this book display the celebratory delight in language which has continued to impress readers and reviewers of Saunders’ work, though here imbued with a disturbed and disturbing awareness of mortality – the ultimate vulnerability from which in the end we derive our deepest sense of self.

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Three long poems - contemplating `The Uses of Greek', imagining the poet Sappho living out her life on the island of Inishbofin, and celebrating `The Farness of Latin' - mark transitions between thematic clusters of shorter pieces. Nominy-Dominy, with its vivid enactment of how, and why, antiquity continues to shape us, will confirm what Michael Hulse, writing in The Poetry Review of her 2012 Cloud Camera, found to be a `most intelligent and thrilling book of poetry'.

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Saint Christina the Astonishing was born into a poor Belgian family in 1150. She 'died' aged 22 but at her requiem she rose from her coffin and flew away like a bird, wanting to escape the smell of sinful humanity. This was the first of many mad, disobedient exploits in her long and remarkable life. Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders retell - through their own poems as well as brief extracts from medieval religious writers - Christina's story as a woman's search for selfhood. The book includes artworks from Peter Hay, which he created for the original edition in direct response to the poetry. First published in 1998 and long out of print, this new edition makes Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders' sensual and exhilarating poetic collaboration available once more. 'Ascetic and excessive, exasperating, sometimes absurd, the life of the little-known St Christina provokes fantasies and questions. Was she a wonder worker? Or an anorexic, fuelled by hatred of the flesh? Or a powerful woman whose legendary flights set her free from her time and her place? Rather than offering pieties or diagnoses, Lesley Saunders and Jane Draycott, invite us to a feast of soul food. Their two distinctive voices meet the voices of the Middle Ages in an extraordinary blend of the sacred and the profane, the rapt and the irreverent, playful, sensual and deeply felt.' Philip Gross 'Poetry as exciting as this is rare: fusing an earthy sensuality with the spiritual, it lets us hear Christina's voice ringing clearly from the rafters.' Robyn Bolam

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This landmark book brings together, for the first time in English, translations of 75 poems by the renowned Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta. It contains selections from each of her 21 volumes of poetry published over a writing career that spans six decades. The poems are presented in their original Portuguese with facing-page English translation by prize-winning poet Lesley Saunders. The book opens with a critical essay by leading scholar in comparative literature, Ana Raquel Fernandes, which - together with the translations - enables an English readership to acquire a sense of the formal, emotional and intellectual power and significance of this poet's work. The book also serves to underline the importance of sustaining cultural connections between the UK and Europe.

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