Tiger Facing The Mist

Pauline Stainer
(Bloodaxe Books, 2013); pbk, £8.95.

And when the sun lifts
over bus lane
and urban foxes
a kind of giddiness
overcomes me…

These lines, from Pauline Stainer’s poem “Primrose Hill Druids”, evoke the dizzying sense of spiritual connection explored in her latest collection, Tiger Facing the Mist. Stainer is a gifted and prolific poet who works “at the margins of the sacred.” This is her eighth Bloodaxe title. Her fourth collection, The Wound-Dresser’s Dream, was shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Poetry Award and in 2009 she received the Cholmondeley Award. Now residing in Suffolk, she has lived in rural Essex and also on the Orkney island of Rousay, locations which have doubtlessly nourished the mystical, haunting quality of her work.

Stainer is constantly searching for what she has termed the “divining shiver.” Her latest collection examines the archaic and the mythic within the context of the modern. Old beliefs and rituals are not outdated themes in Stainer’s hands but extant conundrums brought into the light to be explored. The Guardian’s Frances Leviston has suggested that Stainer has perfected the “art of illumination” and her poetry is diffused with a certain ethereal luminosity but also a precise use of colour: a palette of dusky blues, moonlit opalescence, soft greys and icy whites.

With mere brush strokes of words, thought and feeling, Stainer introduces us to a range of fascinating characters freshly realised: Shakespeare’s Caliban; the goddess Blodeuwedd conjured from meadowsweet; Persephone; Lazarus; Rimbaud. There are Druids and Anglo-Saxon queens, snow-leopards and falcons. Christianity rubs shoulders with Paganism; Krishna walks beside Christ. The reader becomes immersed in the poet’s vision, transported from rural England to Japan, from Orkney to Atlantis, on a sea of arresting impressions.

Stainer is adept at articulating the anxiety and uncertainty of the human condition. In “The Elephants of Atlantis”, she uses the refrain “if only” to introduce a tone of nostalgia and regret for man’s failure:

If only I could lift
Shackleton’s ship
from its bed of ice,
in full sail,
like a bride.

The wistful elusiveness of myth is also explored with a reference to Arthurian legend:

If only I could free
Merlin from his reliquary
of rippleglass
and open the eyes of the dead
when their hair is braided.

Stainer’s instinct for delineating the mundane as something divine is unparalled. In “The Beekeepers” (after Bruegel) for example, she asks the question:

Is it priestcraft they carry
in skeps bound with briar
robed like divines
with visors of wicker?

Her unique perspective imbues each situation, each movement, with a sense of wonder. In the title poem “Tiger Facing the Mist”, the big cat is described thus:

Real or imagined
those grey stripes
moving
through mountain mist
with a sense of music?

The slow pace, the economy of words, the rhetorical question are all typical of Stainer’s tentative yet powerful style.

This collection is immensely readable. It is thought-provoking and intelligent, each poem a stand-alone success. Stainer’s way with words is best summed up by the first verse of “Reading by Snowlight”:

I want to take the weight
out of language
the way snowfall
on the red planet
vaporises before settling.

Sandra Ireland