The Lady & the Hare: New & Selected Poems

By Pauline Stainer

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). The Lady & the Hare brings together poetry of rare luminosity from Pauline Stainer's five previous books, together with new poems, all inhabiting an imaginative borderland inspired by her 'visceral Muse'. '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. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780371382

Pauline Stainer

Pauline Stainer is a freelance writer and tutor. After many years in rural Essex and then on the Orkney island of Rousay, she now lives at Hadleigh in Suffolk. Her Bloodaxe titles 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; and three later collections, 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 2009 Cholmondeley Award for her poetry.

Book preview

PAULINE STAINER

THE LADY & THE HARE

New & Selected Poems

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

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

). The Lady & the Hare brings together poetry of rare luminosity from Pauline Stainer’s five previous books, together with new poems, all inhabiting an imaginative borderland inspired by her ‘visceral Muse’.

‘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.

COVER PAINTING: DETAIL FROM

The Vision of Saint Eustace by Pisanello (c.1395 - c.1455)

(TEMPERA ON WOOD) © NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

Pauline Stainer

THE LADY & THE HARE

New & Selected Poems

In memory of Giselle

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book draws on Pauline Stainer’s five Bloodaxe collections, The Honeycomb (1989), Sighting the Slave Ship (1992), The Ice-Pilot Speaks (1994), The Wound-dresser’s Dream (1996) and Parable Island (1999), and also includes a whole collection of new poems, A Litany of High Waters (2003).

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of the new poems first appeared: Aireings, The Bridport Anthology 2001, Leviathan Quarterly, Near East Review, Oxford Today, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Review, The Rialto and The Times Literary Supplement. ‘The Reversible Waterfall’ was commissioned by Poems for the Waiting Room. The title-sequence of A Litany of High Waters was commissioned and published by the King’s Lynn Poetry Festival, 2002.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

FROM

The Honeycomb (1989)

The Honeycomb

The Figurehead

Figures in a Landscape

The Airfield Falcons

The Bowls Match

The Gargoyles

Walking the Water

The Catalyst

The Ballad of the Lock-keeper’s Daughter

The Misericord

The Drawing

The Plaster Room

Ballad of the Abbot’s Fishpond

The Elderbrides

The Blood Spoor

The Coffin

The Divining of Wounds

Flora in Calix-light

Raking the Japanese Garden

Marksman

The Flute Lesson

The Dancing Mistress

The Boating Party

The Birth

Snake Handler

The Dream of Pilate’s Wife

Cargo

The Crossing

Stepping Off the Aqueduct

FROM

Sighting The Slave Ship (1992)

Sighting the Slave Ship

Piranesi’s Fever

A Haze Held by Thorns

The Blue Beret

To Saskia, with Pearls in Her Hair

The Red King’s Dream

Angel-roof

Structuring the Silence

Transparencies in a Landscape

Music for Invasive Surgery

The Ringing Chamber

Skydivers

The Falconer’s Bride

The Yew Walk

The Victorian Head Dress

The Reprieve

Leonardo draws Bernardo Bandini

A Party of Musicians in a Boat

Enclosed Wheatfield with Rising Sun

Watersnake

Source

Christ to Charon

Goslar Warrior

Fire-bringers

Togare

Mrs John Dowland

Glass-men

St Sebastian

Woman Holding a Balance

Speedskaters

Stag

Equipping the Spirit

Hardy supervises the removal of graves for a railway cutting

Brunel Springs the Bridge

Modern Angels: Eight poems after Eric Ravilious

FROM

The Ice-Pilot Speaks (1994)

The Ice-Pilot Speaks

The Lady and the Hare

Pointing Lady in a Landscape

Frequencies

Between Stations

Sarcophagus

Xochiquetzal

The Dice Players

Christ in a Chimerical Landscape

Burying the Green Boy

Lot’s Wife

Thaw

Axe

Magtelt’s Song

Oxnead Hall, Norfolk

Paragliding over the Spice Routes

This Atomising of Things

Lepers at Dunwich

Threshold

A Blind Man Passes La Sagrada Familia

Bird in Space

Quanta

The Infinite Act

Thomas Traherne in the Orient

Gem-Dice from a Cinnamon Coast

FROM

The Wound-Dresser’s Dream (1996)

Fidra’s Song

Darwin in Patagonia

The creatures preach to St Francis

from Ruskin takes Rose La Touche to the Crystal Palace

By an unknown photographer

Dancing the Mysteries

A Christening by Snowlight

Nightingales at Fingringhoe

The Sleep Laboratory

After the bread-queue massacre

The Wound-dresser’s Dream

Lindow Man

Coleridge goes scuba-diving

This Accomplishing of Light

The Etching

The Feather

Seven thunders utter

from Music for Kshantivada

FROM

Parable Island (1999)

Footfalls

Within North

Sourin

Prima Nix

Blodeuwedd in Orkney

Eynhallow

Thomas Vaughan experiments with mercury

St Brendan’s birds

St Kilda

Lambholm

Bleaklow

Little Egypt

The Stowaways

Parable Island

Epiphany in Umbria

The Fallow Doe

Burning the Vixen

Tracking down the twelve-wired bird of Paradise

Coleridge in Malta

Finding the right blue for the waterfall

Herman Melville jumps ship

Reading the Light

Karumi

Slippage

Gyrfalcon

The Flight of Icarus

Pouring the sand mandala into the Thames

The Colony

Potosí

Robert Louis Stevenson dreams of Orkney in Samoa

Salt over Skara Brae

A Litany of High Waters (2003)

Scarecrow

Girl on Silbury Hill

Joseph of Arimathea crosses the Somerset Levels

Holy Thursday

Walking the tide-line on Ash Wednesday

The Boarding Party

The nightingale’s not telling

The Hangar Ghosts

The Amber Room

Eclipse at Skara Brae

Tundra

Landscape with five-barred gate

The Reversible Waterfall

The White Shell

Garter Snakes Drinking from Snow

The Loneliness in the Garden

Rimbaud and the ship from Aphinar

Dreaming of the Dogger Bank

Finisterre

Landfall

A Litany of High Waters

Falcon on a blue field

Christ in the lava fields

Sea-swallows

The knowledge of water

The Ballad of Ruby Tuesday

The Last Sorcerer

Litanies

In 1445 three Lynn men left the port for Iceland in a dogger called the Trinity

The ambivalence of islands

The Thirteen Days of Christmas

Notes

About the Author

Copyright

FROM

THE HONEYCOMB

(1989)

The Honeycomb

They had made love