Quick

Lawrence Sail was born in London and brought up in Exeter. He studied French and German at Oxford University, then taught for some years in Kenya, before returning to teach in the UK. He is now a freelance writer and lives in Exeter. His retrospective Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, covers work written over four decades, drawing on poems from ten collections, from Opposite Views (1974) to the New Poems (2010) first collected in this volume. It includes poems from four books previously published by Bloodaxe, Out of Land: New & Selected Poems (1992), Building into Air (1995), The World Returning (2002), and Eye-Baby (2006). He has since produced two later collections, The Quick (2015) and Guises (2020). His other books include Cross-currents: essays (Enitharmon, 2005), a memoir of childhood, Sift (Impress Books, 2010), and Songs of the Darkness, a selection of his Christmas poems with illustrations by his daughter, Erica Sail (Enitharmon, 2010). He has edited a number of anthologies, including The New Exeter Book of Riddles (1999) and Light Unlocked: Christmas Card Poems (2005), both co-edited with Kevin Crossley-Holland for Enitharmon, and First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (Faber & Faber, 1988).

'There is a shimmering quality to Sail's sensibility which moves easily between sharply focused observations of the particulars of object and place, the play of light on the locally loved and known, and a constant alertness to larger climates and movements - close and subtle looking and a rich, playful use of language are the tools by which discoveries are made' - Peter Scupham, PN Review. 'Beneath the elegance and refinement of Lawrence Sail's artistry is the ever-present undertow - the current below the aesthetic surface, moving in a contrary direction to that of the surface current, and it is this that gives the poems their authority and depth of vision' - Catherine Beeston, Critical Survey.