Double Takes

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). His later collections are The Quick (2015), Guises (2020) and Double Takes (2026). 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). He also edited South-West Review from 1980 to 1985. He was chairman of the Arvon Foundation from 1990 to 1994. In 1991 he was programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and a judge for the Whitbread Book of the Year awards. He was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1992, and an Arts Council Writer’s Bursary the following year. He was a co-director of the 50th Anniversary Cheltenham Festival of Literature in 1999, and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2004. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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.

• 111 The Last Afternoon of Summer12 Heading South13 Autumn Dreams14 Childermas15 Agents16 Gallows Humour17 Poem for a Hospital Waiting Room18 Dolphins off Skye19 Binsey Lane20 At the Full21 Half-sister22 Non-identical24 One Thing26 Moving Out27 Moonrise29 Three Flower Haiku30 From October31 The Beach at Beer in Winter235 Two poems after James Ravilious35 1  Man Loading Sheaves35 2  Old Tractor37 Frying Eggs38 Vitruvian Man39 Window40 Two poems after John Crome40 1  Yarmouth Jetty41 2  Studying John Crome’s ‘Study of a Burdock’43 Putin beside Gorbachev’s Coffin45 Two poems by Bertolt Brecht45 1  Of Poor B.B.47 2  To Future Generations50 Lines of Enquiry52 Death Ship (after Alfred Wallis)53 Entry357 Twinscape59 Flâneurs60 Balances61 Reprise62 Escape Rooms65 Three Haiku66 Churchyard Primroses67 Odelet68 Funerary69 At a Concert in Winter70 December Haiku71 Winter Song72 After Set!73 The Throw74 Unless75 Beyond76 Yarn79 Acknowledgements