Description
We are living in a world where the relationships between self and other, humans and nature, past and future, reason and passion, have become unbearably precarious and in constant need of renewal. In Broken Or Unbroken…, Lesley Saunders examines this fragility in its personal manifestations – especially in the covenant of marriage. An opening set of poems introduces the collection’s main themes, while the final sequence re-enacts the myth, as told by dramatist Euripides, of Medea and her husband Jason, who deserted her to marry a king’s daughter. The central section of the book reveals what happens when a longstanding marital relationship becomes strange, estranged, through the visitation of Alzheimer’s disease and the realisation of the other person’s ultimate unknowability.
Lesley Saunders. Paperback, 90 pages, 210 x 135 mm, March 2027. The book cover features an artwork by Rebecca Swainston.
About the author: Lesley Saunders is the author of several poetry collections, most recently This Thing of Blood & Love (Two Rivers Press, 2022) and, with the artist Rebecca Swainston, Days of Wonder (Hippocrates Press, 2021), a poetic record of the first year of the COVID pandemic. Her poetry has been featured on BBC Radio 3 as well as in many anthologies; she has won several prestigious awards, including the inaugural Manchester Poetry Prize. Lesley is also a prize-winning translator of modern Portuguese poetry and she is a major contributor to the literature programme, Representations of Home, at the University of Lisbon. Since her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago, Lesley has been exploring the various affinities between poetry and dementia in a series of academic papers and talks.
‘Out of a wild, spinning world of solitary Alzheimer’s care and deep sorrows, “alone and not unafraid” Lesley Saunders creates in Broken Or Unbroken… poems of searching lyrical power and great imaginative energy that, with “the authority of pain”, arrive at a world more lucid and compassionate, created out of a wreckage that might in itself be “a kind of beauty”’ — JANE DRAYCOTT
‘In her striking new collection, Lesley Saunders looks for clues and understanding when confronted with a past altered by the discovery of betrayal and a future without language with which to find answers and healing. In exquisitely crafted poems she searches for the relationship she has lost and with generosity and empathy discovers what is possible within the unfathomability of love’ — CAROLINE SMITH
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