Parable Island

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 * Pauline Stainer writes sacred poetry for the scientific twenty-first century. Her poetry preserves a surety of vision, insisting that belief can only increase with knowledge, and that wisdom and faith are still provinces of careful, crystalline language. She is deeply English and draws from a wealth of sources: medieval lyrics, Eastern as well as Western art, Christian liturgy, and an impressive familiarity with chemistry and optics. -- Anne Stevenson

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). In her fifth collection, Parable Island, she evokes the spareness and luminosity of the land and seascapes of the Orkneys in poems which inhabit an imaginative borderland inspired by her `visceral Muse'.