Guises

Lawrence Sail's poetry is noted for its scrupulous combination of close observation and broader reflections. In Guises he builds on the strengths of twelve previous collections, writing 'in praise of perception', which brings its own challenges and delights, embodied in the shifts and layers of language. A sense of the precious and the precarious informs poems with widely differing subjects and settings. There is, too, a new awareness of the threat to the sumptuousness of the natural world posed by human profligacy. Sounding the provisional nature of our earth-bound experiences, Sail knows the closeness of eulogy to elegy, and his poems celebrating the immediacy of human affections and experience sit aptly alongside those remembering friends who have died. Forty-six years on from the publication of Sail's first book, Guises offers the fruits of fullness.

Table of Contents:
11 Anagrammatic 12 Radishes 13 Falling Back to Earth 14 Cloudlands 15 Samuel Palmer’s Yellow Twilight 16 Lundy Headland 17 Ribblehead Viaduct 19 A Stroll by the River 20 Taking Keriga Nyagwoko Home 21 Vendange 22 At the Equinox 23 The Smoke-tree 24 Winter Sketch 25 Lore 27 Sarabande 28 Soay Sound 29 A Summer Dream 30 Journey 31 Two-step 32 Olympic Cyclists 33 Heartsong 34 Lullaby 35 Pas de Trois 36 Notes on a Fossil Fish 37 Clues 38 Giacometti’s Cat 39 Zigzag 40 Moths Queuing 41 Thinking of Steve Sims 42 Smoke-rings 44 Birdcall 45 Female Head, about 1525 46 Four Late van Goghs 49 A Wedding Photo from 1975 50 Triggers 51 Three Time-signatures 53 Briefing Model for D-Day 54 Woodlice and Earthworm 55 Belonging 56 Cut Flowers 58 Shine 59 Triptych 62 At a Concert 64 Masquerade 66 Seafaring 67 Kepler’s Epitaph 68 Sentences for Vivaldi’s Gloria 69 Instances 70 Sea Pictures 72 Recognition 73 Mayflower 74 Rainer Maria Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy 77 Asphodels 79 Notes

About the Author :
Lawrence Sail was born in London and brought up in Exeter. He studied French and German at Oxford University, then taught for some years in Kenya, before returning to teach in the UK. He is now a freelance writer and lives in Exeter. His retrospective Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, 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. It includes poems from four books previously published by Bloodaxe, Out of Land: New & Selected Poems (1992), Building into Air (1995), The World Returning (2002), and Eye-Baby (2006). He has since published a later collection, The Quick (2015), to be followed by Guises in February 2020. His other books include Cross-currents: essays (Enitharmon, 2005), a memoir of childhood, Sift (Impress Books, 2010), and Songs of the Darkness, a selection of his Christmas poems with illustrations by his daughter, Erica Sail (Enitharmon, 2010). He has edited a number of anthologies, including The New Exeter Book of Riddles (1999) and Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems (2005), both co-edited with Kevin Crossley-Holland for Enitharmon, and First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (Faber & Faber, 1988). He also edited South-West Review from 1980 to 1985. He was chairman of the Arvon Foundation from 1990 to 1994. In 1991 he was programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and a judge for the Whitbread Book of the Year awards. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1992, and an Arts Council Writer's Bursary the following year. In August 1993 he undertook a month-long tour of India for the British Council, for whom he has since worked as visiting writer and lecturer in various countries, including Bosnia, Colombia, Egypt, France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine. From 1994 to 1996 he was the British representative on the jury of the European Literature Prize, and from 2004 to 2007 a judge of the Eric Gregory Awards. In October 1999 he was a co-director of the 50th Anniversary Cheltenham Festival of Literature. In 2004 he received a Cholmondeley Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Review :
The poems can be demanding in their intricacy, inviting and rewarding rereading. They are highly reflective, thought made sensual via routes only poetry can take. It is through microscopic attention to minutiae that Sail sees furthest. Though Sail's work is quietly lyrical and almost undemonstrative at first scan, the poems reveal more and more to the active reader prepared to work hard to mine the gold.