The Quick

By Lawrence Sail

Lawrence Sail's new collection encompasses a striking variety of subjects. He reflects on the natural world, both in micro- and macrocosm, looking for example at flowers, birds, the sea, the earth seen from space; he explores the intricacies and balances of love and family relationships; he finds new resonances in the paintings of David Bomberg, Howard Hodgkin and Paul Klee, and affinities in his translations of Mallarme, Rilke and Trakl. His imaginative scope extends into a sequence of prose poems responding powerfully to Gabriel Faure's nine Preludes for piano. Throughout the collection, close attention to the physical world is paired with the perceptions such careful consideration provokes. Often this embodies a duality - instances of love carry the shadow of grief; a beached boat evokes the horizon; a book is both an object and an emblem of lost authority; the fragment of a Roman carving suggests wholeness restored. Above all, there is in Sail's writing a celebration of the world, its preciousness magnified by the ways in which he takes the measure of what appears in the title poem as 'all that lasts, / all that is gone', the juxtaposition of the transient and the enduring. 'There is a shimmering quality to Sail's sensibility which moves easily between sharply focused observations of the particulars of object and place, the play of light on the locally loved and known, and a constant alertness to larger climates and movements'close and subtle looking and a rich, playful use of language are the tools by which discoveries are made' - Peter Scupham, PN Review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jun 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781780372563

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

THE QUICK

Lawrence Sail’s new collection encompasses a striking variety of subjects. He reflects on the natural world, both in micro- and macrocosm, looking for example at flowers, birds, the sea, the earth seen from space; he explores the intricacies and balances of love and family relationships; he finds new resonances in the paintings of David Bomberg, Howard Hodgkin and Paul Klee, and affinities in his translations of Mallarmé, Rilke and Trakl. His imaginative scope extends into a sequence of prose poems responding powerfully to Gabriel Fauré’s nine Préludes for piano.

Throughout the collection, close attention to the physical world is paired with the perceptions such careful consideration provokes. Often this embodies a duality – instances of love carry the shadow of grief; a beached boat evokes the horizon; a book is both an object and an emblem of lost authority; the fragment of a Roman carving suggests wholeness restored. Above all, there is in Sail’s writing a celebration of the world, its preciousness magnified by the ways in which he takes the measure of what appears in the title poem as ‘all that lasts, / all that is gone’, the juxtaposition of the transient and the enduring.

‘There is a shimmering quality to Sail’s sensibility which moves easily between sharply focused observations of the particulars of object and place, the play of light on the locally loved and known, and a constant alertness to larger climates and movements…close and subtle looking and a rich, playful use of language are the tools by which discoveries are made’ – Peter Scupham, PN Review.

COVER PAINTING

Procession (1912-14) by David Bomberg

OIL ON PAPER LAID ON PANEL: 28.9 X 68.8 cm

ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM OF ART & ARCHAEOLOGY © DACS, LONDON, 2015

LAWRENCE SAIL

THE QUICK

Les enfants et les génies savent qu’il n’existe pas de port, seulement l’eau qui se laisse traverser.

René Char, letter to Georges Braque, May 1947

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications where some of these