Over the past 20 years, Pauline Stainer has all but perfected the art of illumination without demystification, in search of what she calls "the divining shiver", a phrase that can only gesture towards the combination of physical immediacy and numinous wonder that her marvellous poems possess... Stroke by stroke, apprehension by apprehension, Stainer is building a unique and extraordinary body of work. -- Frances Leviston * Guardian *
Pauline Stainer's poems are unlike anyone else's, but they're so strong and clear they bring to mind that in-her-own-time ignored, painfully sensitive yet tough-minded American metaphysical Emily Dickinson. Stainer, though, is deeply English and draws from a wealth of sources: medieval lyrics, Eastern as well as Western art, Christian liturgy, and an impressive familiarity with chemistry and optics. But the subjects which engage her are always human, however referentially sacred or scientifically demonstrated. The honeycomb of the title furnishes her with a symbolic framework for the entire collection. Her bee poems, in their mature way, are as memorable as Sylvia Plath's, her medical poems more healing and forgiving. She writes sacred poetry for the scientific twenty-first century. Her poetry preserves a surety of vision, insisting that belief can only increase with knowledge, and that wisdom and faith are still provinces of careful, crystalline language. -- Anne Stevenson
