The Lady & the Hare: New & Selected Poems

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). The Lady & the Hare brings together poetry of rare luminosity from Pauline Stainer’s five previous books, together with new poems, all inhabiting an imaginative borderland inspired by her ‘visceral Muse’. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Pauline Stainer is a freelance writer and tutor. After many years in rural Essex and then on the Orkney island of Rousay, she spent a number of years in rural Suffolk. She now lives near Saffron Walden. Her nine poetry titles, all of which have been published by Bloodaxe Books, 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. Her three subsequent collections are 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.