Nominy-Dominy

Description

Nominy-Dominy, Lesley Saunders’ fourth collection, is an extended praise-song for the Greek and Latin literature she grew up with as a schoolgirl. These poems respond, in oblique and glancing ways, to the riches of these two cultures: brief glimpses into the dream-world of the Iliad and Odyssey, vignettes of an estranged Roman Britain, and windows onto the mediaeval Latin lyric.

Three long poems – contemplating ‘The Uses of Greek’, imagining the poet Sappho living out her life on the island of Inishbofin, and celebrating ‘The Farness of Latin’ – mark transitions between thematic clusters of shorter pieces. Nominy-Dominy, with its vivid enactment of how, and why, antiquity continues to shape us, will confirm what Michael Hulse, writing in The Poetry Review of her 2012 Cloud Camera, found to be a ‘most intelligent and thrilling book of poetry’.

Lesley Saunders. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 108 pages, April 2018.

Poet of the Week – 5: Lesley Saunders