Lesley Saunders

poet and educationalist

Poetry awards

I recently received commendations in the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Competition 2011, the Cardiff International Poetry Competition 2011, the Frogmore Poetry Competition 2011 and the Bridport Poetry Competition 2011; and I won the adult prize in the poetry competition organised by the Roman Baths in Bath: Roman Baths poetry prize winners.

National Trust prize-winning poem

Read the winning poems in the National Trust poetry competition Landlines, judged by Ian McMillan, in the National Trust Magazine
‘A poem had to startle, surprise and excite’, says Ian, ‘to make our shortlist. Lesley’s poem is technically excellent, she has considered the syllables and the nuts and bolts of her poem, and the imagery is fantastic.’

Leaf Goddess

The question of bracelets is the one about
nakedness and what makes it, how her bare

arm has just brushed against the whale-back
of sky lying against the slow length of her

after all its migrations and tornadoes. 
She imagines practising her feldenkrais

on its tired atmospheres, the inert gases
rippling like glass-eels under her fingers

while she becomes leaf-throat, leaf-speckle,
a tease of beetle-wings and copper beech,

a birds’-nest of precious-metal puffballs
and chlorophylls.  Inevitable then that winter

is what she does best, the meaning
of which is resting roof-deep in leaf-lustre,

naked.  Staying.  Stayed.

© Lesley Saunders

Winner of the National Trust Poetry Competition 2011

Writing workshops

I am an experienced leader of workshops with adults and young people.  I use supportive semi-structured exercises to get the best out of people’s creative and imaginative writing, in prose or poetry.  I am happy to lead small or larger groups, and I particularly enjoy working with people who are less experienced and/or lack confidence, though working with experienced writers is a great pleasure too!  Feedback on my workshops is usually extremely positive.

I am available by arrangement for commissioned workshops, open or themed:  please contact me by e-mail (via the link on my home page).

Details of public workshops are posted here.

(2011) On Saturday 23 July I’m leading a workshop at Acton Court.  Afterwards I’ll be giving a reading of the poems I wrote last year during my residency there.

(2010) Creative writing workshops at the Chelsea Physic Garden, London:  Feedback on the three sessions has been very positive: ‘Organisation was excellent… A lovely, supportive and inspiring atmosphere right from the off - Lesley a wonderful teacher, full of great ideas and insightful comments...’

In 2011 I undertook various short-term projects for the General Teaching Council for England prior to its abolition, including writing an overview paper on the Council’s regulatory role and functions over the ten years of its operation.

Over the three years 2008-2010 I conducted commissioned evaluations for Save the Children of their inclusive education programme in Kosovo. I submitted comprehensive reports, containing recommendations for the sustainability of the programme in the future.  In 2011 I began work on an EU-funded education project, again in Kosovo, designed to support the government’s wide-ranging educational reforms; I wrote a review of the main issues and challenges for monitoring and evaluation systems and processes.  Please contact me if you would like to know more about either of these projects.

Schedule of public poetry readings and performances 2012

Here are the main poetry readings and performances I’m doing in 2012. 

Spring 2012

Sunday 12 February: lunchtime reading with other poets in Great Expectations Hotel, London Street, Reading, to launch the anthology A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens published by Two Rivers Press

Friday 2 March: daytime reading with other poets as part of the Bath Litfest

Wednesday 14 March:  evening reading with Kelley Swain at the Whipple Museum, Cambridge as part of the Cambridge Science Festival

Saturday 17 March: performance of ‘Some Languages Are Hard to Dream In’ with the dancer Liza Wedgwood at 7.30 pm in the hall next to Star Anise Cafe, Stroud, Gloucestershire

Forthcoming:

Saturday 16 June:  featured poet at the Bath Royal Scientific and Literary Institute

Saturday 14 September: performance of ‘Some Languages Are Hard to Dream In’ with the dancer Liza Wedgwood at St Ives Arts Club, Cornwall

Recent reading venues include the Bath LitFest; Swindon Arts Centre; Henley Literary Festival; Acton Court, Iron Acton; Glanfa Stage, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff; Poetry and Voice conference, University of Chichester; Abbey House Gardens, Malmesbury; Turbine House, Reading, with Kate Noakes as part of a collaborative project about rivers and water led by Ann Rapstoff and Hilary Kneale; the Museum of English Rural Life; the Poets Cafe, Reading as guest poet; the Troubadour, London, as the showcase poet for Magma 44; Filthy McNastys, London; the Artsbar Cafe, Wokingham; the Bingham Library, Cirencester; Kellogg College, Oxford; Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

Manchester Poetry Prize 2010

I was delighted to be one of the six finalists in the Manchester Poetry Prize competition 2010, judged by Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw and Daljit Nagra: visit http://www.manchesterwritingcompetition.co.uk/poetry/poetry_lesleysaunders.php to read the portfolio of poems I submitted.

Some Languages Are Hard To Dream In published July 2010

Some Languages Are Hard To Dream In is a sequence of short poems with striking images by Christopher Hedley-Dent.  It is published as a pamphlet by Mulfran Press.

Read reviews of my poetry books and activities

What people have said about…

No Doves:

“Like the dazzling fly-past in her poem ‘Halcyon’, Lesley Saunders’ distinctive blend of wonder and intellectual curiosity emerges in No Doves at full power, each poem a sustained arc of allusive riches, alert and echoing – truly a devotion of noticing.  Her subject is that tension between all that is Hopkins’ “counter, original, spare, strange” and the wider sweep of language and history, which Saunders celebrates here in all its intricacy and pathos.” Jane Draycott

“No Doves is a quite dazzling collection… She shares with fine poets like Jane Draycott and Charles Tomlinson an incredibly clear-eyed perception in language which is as musical as it is exact. Writing of ‘Ice’ she observes: This is the white gold of the poles, the water that rings / like metal having first mastered the stillness of crystals, / and this the discipline of the slow freeze, whose splinters / leave no trace of travel through the muscle of the heart...’ Lesley Saunders is a very exciting and interesting writer who deserves your closer attention.” David Morley
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/morleyd/ 3 May 2010

“Lesley Saunders keeps the ball in the air. Her toe is precisely placed and the poems swing on, line after intelligent line—meditations on stone, cold, blackbirds, a red lipstick, an ear of wheat—all deftly and accurately set out… In Some Languages Are Hard To Dream In, a longer sequence, she puts her best foot forward.  I’ll quote in full part vi.:

Sparrows rustle in the grass like winter leaves
while an old leaf sits like a bird on a wall
saying nothing that anyone can hear.

Don’t you wish you’d written that?  I do.  And each part of the sequence is good. Yes, Lesley Saunders is very worth reading, and re-reading, for she’s not going to make it easy for us, however easy she makes keeping that ball in the air seem...” J. Brookes, Square Magazine #8

Her Leafy Eye:

‘Having been so impressed by the verbal exuberance and richly textured description of Lesley Saunders’ poem “Rill” when I was judging the Buxton Poetry Competition (in which it received first prize), I looked forward to reading the sequence of which it forms part.  I was not disappointed: the rest of Her Leafy Eye lives up to the initial promise of that poem.’ Fleur Adcock

‘The tumbling flow of the words in these poems is very compelling… the poet… exploits that characteristic “English” orchestration of hard and soft sounds… the language builds into various horns of plenty – in fact I could have read another twenty or more poems in this vein.’ Acumen, September 2009

‘…an intriguing lens through which the eye looks back from a lost world to our modern one and back again: a gaze that is more satirical than leafy… Saunders writes densely; images lapping and overlapping and switching from historic to contemporary details are part of her technique. ‘Dovecot’ does this and generates real excitement – its blur of dawn arrests, parachuting “shock-troops”, forensics and surveillance evoking Shakespeare’s Coriolanus fluttering the dovecot of the Volscians to create a nightmarish portrait of England’s lost order and harmony… the language… secures a place in the reader’s mind.’ Magma, November 2009

‘Great breadth and subtlety of thought and construction inform the whole collection, together with a huge sensuous energy: this is partly a matter of reference and image, stimulated no doubt by being in the fresh air with trees and water and artfully activated vistas, as well as the poet’s evident acquaintance with early-mid-18th-century culture; but it also seems to spring through the language.’ Elizabeth James http://theunderfoot.blogspot.com/2009/08/pomes-and-gardens.html

The writing workshops:

‘I really enjoyed it – it was truly inspiring’
‘That was such an inspiring afternoon on Saturday – I found it thoroughly stimulating’
‘Thank you so much for your lovely workshops; I really enjoyed both of them’
‘Thanks again for running the wonderful workshop, I really enjoyed it!’
‘The poetry was magical!’ (Session for headteachers and school senior leaders)
‘your workshop was a wonderful experience, not only for being with like minded people but for opening up my creative side once again. Now I’ve started I can’t stop the creative flow, much to the detriment of housework! Thank you for an inspirational workshop’

The writing ‘clinics’:

‘It was absolutely wonderful to meet you and your advice was very useful.  I cannot thank you enough’
‘This was a really precious time for me’
‘Everybody that I have spoken to was completely delighted with the feedback session that they had with you on Thursday and have come home and made changes and worked on their pieces, which is amazing.’

The commissioned poems:

‘The poem is quite wonderful, and was, as I hope you realised, greatly appreciated by everyone.  It made the occasion very special’
‘I just love the poem – really beautiful and evocative and the links you have made to Bruner, Crowe and Lively are excellent’
‘Your poem was simply perfect.  I know that X will treasure that more than anything.  It was the perfect capstone to a splendid evening.’
‘What a beautiful poem; its theme, its verse and its delivery all succeeded in rounding off an important evening for so many of us…’

Poetry collection, ‘No Doves’, published February 2010

My third poetry collection, No Doves, was published in February 2010 by Mulfran Press

The theme that runs through the book is the ‘creatureliness’ of all existence:  how distinctions between the non-human and human worlds dissolve as you look at them – rather like ‘the act / of walking through walls’.  Metamorphic rather than anthropomorphic, the poems imagine, for example, a newborn baby as a field of winter wheat, ‘frail and dangerous / as cut glass, / a barbarous / new nation’; the sound of a man working in his garage evokes a house-cricket ‘rasping away at the peccata mundi’.  A drunk slumped on a railway platform while a mouse runs between the rails stirs up notions of ‘dangers in transit… / the sun-god in hiding, all the plagues out and hunting’.  Of the two longer lyrical sequences in the collection, one explores the psychological correlatives of water, while the second proposes a European identity made out of fragments, migrations, and the way ‘one country slowly becomes another / as grains of sand in the seams of suitcases / … cross invisible lines’. 

Yet the book as a whole is really a meditation on the notion that ‘the only thing to be had on earth / is love, leafless, wintering’.

‘Her Leafy Eye’ published July 2009

My new book of poems, Her Leafy Eye, with beautiful images by artist/horticulturalist Geoff Carr, is available from 1 July - go to Two Rivers Press to buy a copy!

Two commissioned poems - for a garden and for the opening of a new college building, Oxford

As well as being a Research Fellow at the Department of Education, Oxford University, I studied for both my PGCE and DPhil there. I have particularly fond memories over the years of its garden, which was designed in the 1960s by Dame Sylvia Crowe.  All the ecological principles she espoused and illustrated in her book Garden Design (first published in 1958) are intimately enacted in this courtyard-like space: unity, scale, space, time, light and shade, tone and texture.  You can download a copy here Garden poem by Lesley Saunders.pdf

The second poem - a kind of meditation on the college crest - was commissioned to mark the opening of the dining hall at Kellogg College, Oxford.  The building previously housed part of the Pitt-Rivers ethnological collection.

Grace

For what you are about to receive is something broken
that needs no mending: the daily loaves of give and take,
the elementary etiquette of harvest and its common wealth.

For what you are about to walk through is a portal
that needs no password, a door you found already open,
an arch joined at the fingertips or your face lit by a rainbow.

For what you are about to learn by heart is a library
that needs no deciphering, its leaves shining with questions
like a great feast laid out for you on the high table of summer.

Yet in some future winter carved of wood and stone and sky,
in the quiet refectory of its evening, every windowpane a wall
of dark and the garden still as glass, you may find yourself

toasting the old hunter-gatherers, how once they were encased
bone by bone here: praise-singers, full of strangeness, grace.

© Lesley Saunders 2009

One thing I never asked

Arranged and sung by Bobby Patrick

mp3 format

For women of a certain age

a poster for Leeds Hospital waiting rooms - design by Jess Laljee