Crossing the Snowline
Published on 23. October 2008
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-85224-812-3 (ISBN)
Description
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). Crossing the Snowline, charts her return to life after numbing grief. These luminous poems are a testament of recovery, renewal and redemption.
Pauline Stainer writes: 'I think this collection, varied as it is, is primarily the record of my journey out of long fallow after the death of my daughter. It's not confessional, but explores obliquely the nature of that fallow, and the necessity of living by light even in darkness. Many things inform the poems: my learning to paint ('the swirling oxides'), light on landscape in different places, Suffolk, Orkney, India, Japan, and the Azores. For a time, grief took away the magical currency of the word - a strange experience for a poet. I had to wait with the patience of one of those pack animals from the salt desert, for an upbeat - the pressure of sap in sunlight on ground of vermilion. And yes, the light is different. Its after light. But I'm still driven to catch in words the stars and their electric circus, and to write in praise of flying squirrels.'
Pauline Stainer writes: 'I think this collection, varied as it is, is primarily the record of my journey out of long fallow after the death of my daughter. It's not confessional, but explores obliquely the nature of that fallow, and the necessity of living by light even in darkness. Many things inform the poems: my learning to paint ('the swirling oxides'), light on landscape in different places, Suffolk, Orkney, India, Japan, and the Azores. For a time, grief took away the magical currency of the word - a strange experience for a poet. I had to wait with the patience of one of those pack animals from the salt desert, for an upbeat - the pressure of sap in sunlight on ground of vermilion. And yes, the light is different. Its after light. But I'm still driven to catch in words the stars and their electric circus, and to write in praise of flying squirrels.'
Reviews / Votes
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. -- Anne StevensonMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
233 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-812-3 (9781852248123)
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Other editions
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Person
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 (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.