Tiger Facing the Mist

By Pauline Stainer

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 eighth collection Tiger Facing the Mist are minimal but highly charged -with presences and hauntings, sensing the spirit incarnate in every part of the living world. 'Over the past 20 years, Pauline Stainer has all but perfected the art of illumination without demystification, in search of what she calls "the divining shiver", a phrase that can only gesture towards the combination of physical immediacy and numinous wonder that her marvellous poems possess… Stroke by stroke, apprehension by apprehension, Stainer is building a unique and extraordinary body of work' -Frances Leviston, Guardian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370934

Pauline Stainer

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 2009 Cholmondeley Award for her poetry.

Book preview