Lesley Saunders – författare

This book provides a fascinating insight into the sometimes troubled relationship between ‘research’ and ‘policy-making’ in education. It shows how each of these areas of social and intellectual endeavour is in a state of dynamic change and how, as a result, they are becoming more mutually inter-permeable and posing increasingly challenging problems for each other. It suggests a number of scenarios for the future development of the relationship and throws down some challenges for both communities.Drawing together contributions from the premier league of UK educationalists the book is both thought-provoking and anxiously awaited by other academics wanting to learn from the experience of senior researchers.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the sometimes troubled relationship between ‘research’ and ‘policy-making’ in education. It shows how each of these areas of social and intellectual endeavour is in a state of dynamic change and how, as a result, they are becoming more mutually inter-permeable and posing increasingly challenging problems for each other. It suggests a number of scenarios for the future development of the relationship and throws down some challenges for both communities.Drawing together contributions from the premier league of UK educationalists the book is both thought-provoking and anxiously awaited by other academics wanting to learn from the experience of senior researchers.

A Greek merchant-explorer Pytheas - whose home port was the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseilles) - is said to be the first person to have circumnavigated the British Isles, in 325 BCE, thereby fixing the islands in the historical imagination as archipelagic, maritime, aloof. His own account of the voyage is lost. This poem attempts to make good that lack, albeit in the consciousness of countless other voyages (imagined as much as real) that have intervened.

This Thing of Blood & Love, Lesley Saunders’ fifth collection with Two Rivers Press, is an intense examination of human culpability, the secrets we half-keep from ourselves, the contradictory selves we inhabit, the histories that live on unreconciled in us, the planet whose imperfect stewards we are; and above all the unfathomable mystery of being (in) a body, incarnated, made flesh – a thing of blood and love that betrays us with its appalling vulnerabilities.The poems in this book display the celebratory delight in language which has continued to impress readers and reviewers of Saunders’ work, though here imbued with a disturbed and disturbing awareness of mortality – the ultimate vulnerability from which in the end we derive our deepest sense of self.

Saint Christina the Astonishing was born into a poor Belgian family in 1150. She ‘died’ aged 22 but at her requiem she rose from her coffin and flew away like a bird, wanting to escape the smell of sinful humanity. This was the first of many mad, disobedient exploits in her long and remarkable life. Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders retell – through their own poems as well as brief extracts from medieval religious writers – Christina’s story as a woman’s search for selfhood. The book includes artworks from Peter Hay, which he created for the original edition in direct response to the poetry. First published in 1998 and long out of print, this new edition makes Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders’ sensual and exhilarating poetic collaboration available once more. A Two Rivers Press illustrated classic.‘Ascetic and excessive, exasperating, sometimes absurd, the life of the little-known St Christina provokes fantasies and questions. Was she a wonder worker? Or an anorexic, fuelled by hatred of the flesh? Or a powerful woman whose legendary flights set her free from her time and her place? Rather than offering pieties or diagnoses, Lesley Saunders and Jane Draycott, invite us to a feast of soul food. Their two distinctive voices meet the voices of the Middle Ages in an extraordinary blend of the sacred and the profane, the rapt and the irreverent, playful, sensual and deeply felt.’ – Philip Gross ‘Poetry as exciting as this is rare: fusing an earthy sensuality with the spiritual, it lets us hear Christina’s voice ringing clearly from the rafters.’ – Robyn Bolam ‘Christina the Astonishing is strange, wild, exhilarating: as in a piece of medieval polyphony, the authors mingle their voices, making connections between history and fantasy, between inner life and outer witness. I was intrigued, entertained, and – yes – astonished.’ – Marina Warner