Full Description
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.
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
