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ARTS  POETRY That Shiver of Recognition Poetry editor Peter Abbs introduces seven poems by Pauline Stainer Pauline Stainer’s work has been greatly admired for its visionary gleam as much as its economy of expression. A poet of the numinous, she captures with an exquisite precision those elusive moments of experience that are charged with strangeness and mystery. She draws on an eclectic range of sources, from Christian theology to Eastern art and optics, but always converts the material into her own personal vision and idiom, crystalline and memorable. These poems have been taken from her seventh volume, Tiger Facing the Mist, to be published next year. Pauline writes: “The wellspring of my writing is an awareness of things incarnational in a scientific age. Let me give an example. One evening I was driving at dusk under some huge pylons. There were the stealing blues of late twilight, the charged luminosity of a great hanging moon. Strange conjunctions, as if the world swung a moment on some remote hinge – as when John Nash saw the field of corn in motion like a waterfall. And it is that release of energy, that shiver of recognition, the seal of the numinous, which informs my work.” Against hesitancy White on white. Under the snow Chinese musicians still play to their dancing geese. Outer and inner landscapes, the perilous process of what you do with what you see like that moment unreadable as dewfall, when we watched men from the obser vator y release young sea-eagles into the drizzle. The key and the crystal Snowflakes fernlike, stellar falling so slowly they seem stationar y I watch them come into focus each a latchkey to language its bright anxiety never repeated. After long fallow It’s an or thodox insight – ever y seventh year the land must lie fallow, even the river go underground. Beyond the lilies of the field, little animals lean into the wind as if listening to its subsong while we wait for that rekindling which conjures a blue abstract out of the flaxfield. Hares at dusk They give nothing away in the lesser dark, the var ying hares their focus the shuttered blues between pasture and late snow. It is mesmerising how many things go missing at the witching hour only a waterworn moon and the rippling machiner y of the moment still holding the light. 34 Resurgence & Ecologist November/December 2012
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Looking at Light (Wantisden, Suffolk, 2011) by David Tress (represented by Messums, London) How the snowleopard became We can barely detect them – Rauschenberg’s white paintings where all surface interest is the shadow of passers-by falling upon them or the darker profundity on Everest, when Mallor y put his snow-goggles in his pocket as if the light was failing before he fell or that moment when the muzzle of the snow-leopard comes into mottled focus and burns through the blizzard. The nature of the game It’s a long discipline firing the kiln, waiting for alchemy of ash and oxide, a white glaze transparent of itself with no green cast the fuse and focus in catching that accidental – like an intact body found in a salt-mine – hermetic, rapt, the way freshwater sings in the iceberg. In praise of flying squirrels Understatement is not their thing as they graze the barbaric blue like unauthorised gods theirs is the middle kingdom below swift and sickle moon, small drama, with deep focus their bleached bellies cross-bandaged in the diagonal light until at dusk the stars let slip another electric circus Tiger Facing the Mist by Pauline Stainer will be published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. Poetry is edited by Peter Abbs. www.peterabbs.org Issue 275 Resurgence & Ecologist 35

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ARTS  POETRY

That Shiver of Recognition Poetry editor Peter Abbs introduces seven poems by Pauline Stainer

Pauline Stainer’s work has been greatly admired for its visionary gleam as much as its economy of expression. A poet of the numinous, she captures with an exquisite precision those elusive moments of experience that are charged with strangeness and mystery. She draws on an eclectic range of sources, from Christian theology to Eastern art and optics, but always converts the material into her own personal vision and idiom, crystalline and memorable. These poems have been taken from her seventh volume, Tiger Facing the Mist, to be published next year.

Pauline writes: “The wellspring of my writing is an awareness of things incarnational in a scientific age. Let me give an example. One evening I was driving at dusk under some huge pylons. There were the stealing blues of late twilight, the charged luminosity of a great hanging moon. Strange conjunctions, as if the world swung a moment on some remote hinge – as when John Nash saw the field of corn in motion like a waterfall. And it is that release of energy, that shiver of recognition, the seal of the numinous, which informs my work.”

Against hesitancy White on white. Under the snow Chinese musicians still play to their dancing geese. Outer and inner landscapes, the perilous process of what you do with what you see like that moment unreadable as dewfall, when we watched men from the obser vator y release young sea-eagles into the drizzle.

The key and the crystal Snowflakes fernlike, stellar falling so slowly they seem stationar y I watch them come into focus each a latchkey to language its bright anxiety never repeated.

After long fallow It’s an or thodox insight – ever y seventh year the land must lie fallow, even the river go underground. Beyond the lilies of the field, little animals lean into the wind as if listening to its subsong while we wait for that rekindling which conjures a blue abstract out of the flaxfield.

Hares at dusk They give nothing away in the lesser dark, the var ying hares their focus the shuttered blues between pasture and late snow. It is mesmerising how many things go missing at the witching hour only a waterworn moon and the rippling machiner y of the moment still holding the light.

34

Resurgence & Ecologist

November/December 2012

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