Sail, Lawrence

Songs of the Darkness brings together a selection of poems for Christmas written over a period of more than thirty years. They are notable for their combination of a close focus and breadth, and for the way in which the seasonal is celebrated alongside the challenges of history and the beauty of the natural world. Trees, flowers, creatures and landscapes are set memorably in the context of the Christmas story and the calendar: and topographically the poems range from a Romanian convent to a Devon beach to an alpine cablecar.