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Monday 13th February

Crossing The Snowline By Pauline Stainer

Posted at 10:38AM Tuesday 30 Dec 2008

Crossing the Snowline
ISBN: 9781852248123

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. In language at once as penetrating as "the swan entering Leda / like laser / through alabaster" and as resilient as "the purchase of lupin on pumice" (both phrases from her selected poems, The Lady and the Hare), she joins a line of recent English poets - David Harsent, Ted Hughes, Kathleen Raine - in guarding the power of our occult and mythological heritage as persuasively as she captures visitations from rare birds, or explores the arcana of physics.

Crossing the Snowline provides further evidence of her exquisite control and spiritual openness, but in a visibly contracted and more intimate form. Stainer has always been a concise poet, even when writing the sequences that David Morley described as "Venn diagrams of poems", partly because the elemental effects that interest her, those of light and movement, "indigo on a tremble", "the pulse of a hare", are gone themselves almost as soon as they are perceived; and partly because she works cumulatively, amassing a greater picture from smaller parts. Deer step from one poem into the next; "holloways of bone" become "holloways / between blue sloes"; a hawk thrown in one poem sulks in another.

Tags: Frances Leviston | Poetry

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