Parable Island
Published on 25. November 1999
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-1-85224-501-6 (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). In her ?fth collection, Parable Island, she evokes the spareness and luminosity of the land and seascapes of the Orkneys in poems which inhabit an imaginative borderland inspired by her 'visceral Muse'.
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 * Pauline Stainer writes sacred poetry for the scientific twenty-?rst 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 StevensonMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
Weight
157 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-501-6 (9781852245016)
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Schweitzer Classification
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.