So Coleridge outlined to Joseph Cottle, his publisher-with gargantuan optimism, and an intention to impress-the requirements necessary to produce an Epic poem.

Pauline Stainer's first full collection, The Honeycomb, was not published until she was 48 years old. It is not an Epic poem, although the book develops into a cohesive sequence of poems.

I do not suggest that Stainer set herself a similar curriculum to STC before putting pen to paper but there is some critical relevance in considering this matter of poetic content. Many critics have found her work too esoteric and allusive as if there should be some mutually agree point (presumably with the reader) at which the poet puts a brake on warming the mind with universal science.

In Sourin, one of the lovely sea-sprayed poems in this issue of PQR, is the line The poetry is not firstly in the words. I take this to imply not that language is merely mimetic and at the service of content but that the poet is searching that image-laden hallowed ground, before 'the words': that the astonishing range of Stainer's source material does, in fact, free the language to produce a parallel creative world-the poem itself.

The Honeycomb (1989) delivered an exciting major new voice to the English poetry world. The extraordinary visual imagery:

.... the honeycomb stretched
Between lath and plaster of the outer wall.

For a century
The bees had wintered there,
Prisoning sugar in virgin wax.


At times of transition,
Spring and autumn,
Their vibration swelled the room.
...........................(The Honeycomb)

the intensity of experienced knowledge:

Divine
the foetal heartbeat,
the pulse through the caul.
....................(Walking the Water)

These poems were memorable word/paintings. They still, on re-reading them eight years later, have not lost any of their vividness even if, perhaps, they seem a little too well framed. In Sighting of the Slave Ship (1992) the poetry, ('the slave ship') as the title poem tells comes to unexpected latitudes. and:

.... something more exotic-
that sense
of a slight shift of cargo
while becalmed.

And that 'shift' of emphasis continues in The Ice Piolt Speaks (1994). There is more than just a hint of Coleridgean presence here apart from the title poem itself (Pauline Stainer's own 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'?) This is an intense collection attempting (like Coleridge) to fuse the visceral with the spiritual; to synthesize light and sound. (A light in sound, a sound-like power in light.-S. T. Coleridge. The Eolian Harp).
In War Requiem the outer world forces its way into the concert hall:

During the Lachrymosa
we could hear people hammering
bits out of the Berlin wall
....
and Britten's soprano-
did she hear
the perfect pitch
of crystals
infusing the gas chambers

In the The Wound-Dresser's Dream (1996) the language is more minimal; both the risks taken and the rewards received are greater:

....
the hanging fire
of their wounds
he felt again

the strange rubato
of his own heart
beating with theirs

for several minutes
after extraction.
       (Gilgamesh)

Pauline Stainer, in reviewing her own book writes: 'This desire to shape the source, this deep fetching, lets dynamics surface from water which the sun never reaches.' Her work is full of obsessions, of hauntings, of those images ...... sometimes imperfectly incarnate.
And the power to amaze one as well.