In compiling her Collected Poems, Kathleen Raine was uniquely placed to look back on more than six decades of her poetry and to decide the canon by which she wished to be judged and remembered. From its first appearance her poetry has been recognised as possessing a rare imaginative integrity, remaining faithful to a formal purity of voice, as well as to an imagery whose resonances are at once her own voice yet speak as if from the heart of the human condition itself. These are poems of wonder, of distillation and, ultimately, of affirmation.
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.
