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.
