Book of the month February 2022

Kathleen Raine - Collected Poems

This month’s choice is: The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine published by Faber.

Kathleen Raine is a poet that has faded somewhat into obscurity in recent years but she is so worth seeking out. Her first collection, Stone and Flower, was published in 1943 and was illustrated by Barbara Hepworth.

Raine’s work is peppered with ancient landscapes, stone, water, spells and mythology.

She managed to harness both the ethereal, mystical aspects of landscape and the deep, brooding, earthiness of it too. For us she encapsulated, effortlessly, the atmosphere of a Stone Club adventure; often damp, windy and with soggy socks but with a sense of absolute wonder about the magic and ‘otherness’ of many of the places we visit.

This definitive collection demonstrates a lifetime's commitment to the learning of the imagination, and, since original publication in 2000, has confirmed Raine's reputation as a poet who has unfailingly given voice to a vision of life in which the temporal, in all its modes and places, is imbued with the numinous and the eternal.