Lesley Saunders

poet and educationalist

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. ... 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…’

Schedule of public poetry readings and performances in 2010

June, July, August
I’m reading and presenting a paper at the Poetry and Voice conference at the University of Chichester, 25 - 27 June.

On Sunday 11 July Mulfran Press, in association with Academi, is launching my pamphlet, Some Languages Are Hard To Dream In, with graphics by Christopher Hedley-Dent.  Christopher’s work is on display and we’re joined by dancer Liza Wedgwood, who responds to my spoken words with a short performance.  Everyone welcome, free entry, 6.00 pm, Glanfa Stage, the the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff. 

On the evening of Wednesday 14 July I’m reading with other Two Rivers Press poets Adrian Blamires, Victoria Pugh and Peter Robinson at the Museum of English Rural Life. 

On Sunday 1st August I’m leading a workshop and giving a performance of my work as poet-in-residence at Acton Court, a Tudor house built for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Matthew Spring, a renowned lutenist and hurdy-gurdy player, is accompanying the reading. 

September
On 20th September I’m reading again at the Troubadour.

On 30th September I’m reading with Kate Noakes at the Henley Literary Festival, in one of the delightful River Readings on board the Hibernia - Jane Draycott is the MC.

October onwards
I’ll be reading at Wotton-under-Edge Arts Centre, Gloucestershire, and at the new Poetry Cafe in Swindon - more details nearer the time.

Recent reading venues include Bath Poetry Cafe, Bath; Abbey House Gardens, Malmesbury; Acton Court, Iron Acton; the Turbine House, Reading, 5 June, with Kate Noakes as part of a collaborative project about rivers and water led by Ann Rapstoff and Hilary Kneale; The Rose, Maidenhead (open mic the first Thursday of each month in the upstairs room of a small popular pub on King Street); Three Blind Mice, 5 Ravey Street, London (a great venue with poetry readings on the third Wednesday of most months); 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 in Cirencester, and Kellogg College in Oxford.

Writing workshops at Chelsea Physic Garden

I am running three creative writing workshops at the Chelsea Physic Garden, London, in the summer and autumn.  The venue is an enticing and evocative garden founded in the 17th century for the cultivation and study of herbal and medicinal plants.  Visit Chelsea Physic Garden Adult Learning for details of course dates and times.  You do not need to be an experienced writer to enjoy these sessions!

I have recently completed a commissioned evaluation for Save the Children of their inclusive education programme in Kosovo.  I spent ten days in the field interviewing teachers, headteachers, young people, parents, education officers and project staff; I have submitted a comprehensive report, containing recommendations for the sustainability of the programme in the future.  Please contact me if you would like to know more about this project.

New poetry collection, ‘No Doves’, published February 2010

My new collection, No Doves, is 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’.

A poem for an Oxford garden

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 read the poem on the OUDE website here or download a copy here Garden poem by Lesley Saunders.pdf

‘Her Leafy Eye’ published 1 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!

A poem commissioned for the opening of a new college building, Oxford

This 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.

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

Rill

Rill

Water’s fickle.  Its uncalled-for free-fall
over mangroves and patios fills

the monsoon afternoons with grand pianos,
a flash-flood of fishes, the slapstick

of mudflats: lucky for some.  A bucket or well
will hold a week of sky close as milk

but a sleeve of silk is thirst from shoulder
to wrist, water runs through its weave

like blood in a vein, its one unbroken thread
bright as a road, tall and taut as a fell.

Left out in the sun, a land burns to saltpans
and dustbowls, hands empty of gifts.

Like caliphs we wait for the snowmelt, first
seep of spring in the ditch, its skeins

of wet felting the stones under mulberry, myrtle,
till all we hear is this hurtle of newborns,

the clean clear voices of acequias, alcantarillas,
the paddling scarlet feet of partridge chicks.