Lawrence Sail Knihy

Substantial retrospective by leading British poet covering work written over four decades from ten collections.

Exploring the human quest for home, this collection reflects on the striving to elevate urban landscapes into something transcendent. The opening sequence responds to three unnamed English cities while also encompassing wider historical and geographical themes. It features a variety of poems, including love poems and those about family, friends, and nature. Building into Air complements the author's previous work, Out of Land: New & Selected Poems, showcasing his continued exploration of personal and communal experiences.

Lawrence Sail is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Forty-six years on from the publication of his first book, Guises offers the fruits of fullness. His poetry explores belief and doubt, memory and imagination, art and perception, the loss of friends and the state of our ailing planet.

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 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.