Sleeping under the Juniper Tree

Pauline Stainer is a freelance writer and tutor. After many years in rural Essex and then on the Orkney island of Rousay, she now lives at Hadleigh in Suffolk. Her Bloodaxe titles 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, and three later collections, 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.

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.

• Elijah sleeping under the juniper tree Bach after dark Alchemist in search of a voice Nativity with beehives The marvellous blemish Percussion Hindsight At the mind's edge Pompeii Burial The control room Shaman's mirror Water-mirror The library of water Closure The glass cloud Spirit-level Lone surfer The stilling John Donne arriving in heaven Fantasia upon one note Lute-maker in a north light Frankenstein on Orkney The jade quarry Japanese acrobats at the Crystal Palace A step to the Japanese garden The bamboo theatre May The nine of hares The Copse The brazen foxes White doe Spring snow Inner garden A place between places The anxiety of sunlight Borderland The Rosary Quay The invisible year The convention Snowfall in Babylon Forest with mistletoe Resource Rewilding Avoriaz Aftermath After Gerhard Richter The shape of forgetting The Mondaytown bat Accidentals The leavening Afterlife Prophecy