Eye Baby

‘Eye-Baby’ bears striking witness to the powers of perception, whether in terms of the observing – and reflecting – human eye, the camera lens or the mind’s eye of imagination and memory. Here are poems which meditate on the links between sight and insight, covering many points on the journey from childhood to old age. Some are prompted by actual journeys; others take up Lawrence Sail’s abiding concern with the sea and the natural world; others weigh the visions of artists in the frame of history.

Throughout, there is an acute awareness of the ambiguities which surround experience, and which contrast darkness and delight. ‘Sail’s centre field is an intimate, intelligent and wholly human place…Despite a climate of linguistic shifts and ironies, people continue to feel simply, directly and, sometimes, devastatingly’ – george szirtes, ‘Poetry Review’. ‘Witty, memorable and rich in feeling.

The emotional truth of these poems is lit up by a rare buoyancy of vision, and line after line strikes with fresh, original force’ – helen dunmore on ‘The World Returning’. ‘Disturbances, threats and doubts are confronted in his poems, but there is an equally vivid tendency towards celebration…There is a genuine presence of affection in his writing, of world-love and enjoyments’ – douglas dunn, ‘Poetry Review’. ‘You should read Lawrence Sail.

He doesn’t write like anyone else. A reliable, experienced poet, his eyes are always open. He misses nothing, and he offers no easy answers, but his gaze is invariably compassionate.

His writing teaches us how ‘the heart can blossom, even in the heavy earth of here and now’…We need such poetry in these tricky times’ – R.V. Bailey, ‘Envoi’.