Sleeping under the Juniper Tree

by Pauline Stainer

Overview

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). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her ninth collection Sleeping under the Juniper Tree are minimal but highly charged - with presences and hauntings, sensing the spirit incarnate in every part of the living world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780373416
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	04/27/2017
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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 Cholmondeley Award for her poetry in 2009.

Table of Contents

Elijah sleeping under the juniper tree 11

Bach after dark 12

Alchemist in search of a voice 13

Nativity with beehives 14

The marvellous blemish 15

Percussion 16

Hindsight 17

At the mind's edge 18

Pompeii 19

Burial 20

The control room 21

Shaman's mirror 22

Water-mirror 23

The library of water 24

Closure 25

The glass cloud 26

Spirit-level 27

Lone surfer 28

The stilling 29

John Donne arriving in heaven 30

Fantasia upon one note 31

Lute-maker in a north light 32

Frankenstein on Orkney 33

The jade quarry 34

Japanese acrobats at the Crystal Palace 35

A step to the Japanese garden 36

The bamboo theatre 37

May 38

The nine of hares 39

The Copse 40

The brazen foxes 41

White doe 42

Spring snow 43

Inner garden 44

A place between places 45

The anxiety of sunlight 46

Borderland 47

The Rosary Quay 48

The invisible year 49

The convention 50

Snowfall in Babylon 51

Forest with mistletoe 52

Resource 53

Rewilding 54

Avoriaz 55

Aftermath 56

After Gerhard Richter 57

The shape of forgetting 58

The Mondaytown bat 59

Accidentals 60

The leavening 61

Afterlife 62

Prophecy 63