Waking Dreams

Lawrence Sail's poems balance dream and history, delight and unease: they weigh the art of the possible against the encroachment of time. This substantial retrospective 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. The new poems continue to explore Sail's characteristic themes - the border country between belief and doubt; the interplay of memory and imagination; the possibilities of art; the context of silence: and they do so with a fresh inwardness. Attentive to the often alluring details of the material and natural world, many of them reflecting the writer's love of the sea, the poems also contemplate the relationship between appearance and essence. The closing poem, 'Ghostings', offsets a keen awareness of the world as it is against the parameters of a child's perceptions and a quest for a vision of wholeness.