Guises

By Lawrence Sail

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Feb 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781780374642

Lawrence Sail

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.

Book preview

LAWRENCE SAIL

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 translation of Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, with its wholehearted acceptance of mortality, chimes aptly with poems celebrating the immediacy of human affections, including those remembering friends who have died. Forty-six years on from the publication of Sail’s first book, Guises offers the fruits of fullness.

‘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.’ – Poetry Book Society Bulletin

‘It is through microscopic attention to minutiae that Sail sees furthest.’ – Andrew McCulloch, Times Literary Supplement

‘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.’ – Patrick Lodge, Envoi

Cover painting (detail): Yellow Twilight (c. 1830) by Samuel Palmer

© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

LAWRENCE SAIL

Guises

for Matthew and Erica

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications, where versions of some of these poems first appeared: Archipelago, Oxford Review of Books, PN Review, Scintilla, Stand, Temenos, The Rialto.

‘Lundy Headland’ was included in Hwaet! 20 years of Ledbury Poetry Festival, ed. Mark Fisher (Bloodaxe Books, 2016). ‘Female Head, about 1525’ was first published in From Palette to Pen, ed. Frances-Anne King (The Holburne Museum, 2016). ‘Heartsong’ was included in The Book of the Heart, ed. Wendy French, Michael Hulse, Donald Singer (The Hippocrates Press, 2017). ‘Three Time-signatures’ was included in Strike up the Band, ed. Merryn Williams (Shoestring Press, 2017). ‘A Wedding Photograph from 1975’ first appeared in Wheel of the Stars, ed. Anna Avebury, Gillian Knibbs, Greg Smith (Ver Poets, 2016). ‘Masquerade’ was commissioned by The Centre for Christianity and Culture at Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, and The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. ‘Mayflower’ was commissioned by Plymouth City Council to mark the quatercentenary of the sailing of The Mayflower.