The Quick - Couverture souple

Sail, Lawrence

 
9781780372556: The Quick

Synopsis

Lawrence Sail's new collection encompasses a striking variety of subjects. He reflects on detail in 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.

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À propos de l?auteur

Lawrence Sail 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. In 1999 he was a co-director of the 50th Anniversary Cheltenham Festival of Literature. He is a freelance writer and lives in Exeter. He has published six books of poetry with Bloodaxe, including his retrospective Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). His other books include Cross-currents: essays (Enitharmon, 2005), a memoir, Sift (Impress Books, 2010), and Songs of the Darkness, a selection of his Christmas poems with illustrations by Erica Sail (Enitharmon, 2010).

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