This Thing of Blood & Love

This Thing of Blood & Love, Lesley Saunders’ fifth collection with Two Rivers Press, is an intense examination of human culpability, the secrets we half-keep from ourselves, the contradictory selves we inhabit, the histories that live on unreconciled in us, the planet whose imperfect stewards we are; and above all the unfathomable mystery of being (in) a body, incarnated, made flesh – a thing of blood and love that betrays us with its appalling vulnerabilities.

The poems in this book display the celebratory delight in language which has continued to impress readers and reviewers of Saunders’ work, though here imbued with a disturbed and disturbing awareness of mortality – the ultimate vulnerability from which in the end we derive our deepest sense of self.

Author Biography

Lesley Saunders is the author of several poetry collections, most recently ‘Nominy-Dominy’ (Two Rivers Press, 2018) and, with Philip Gross, ‘A Part of the Main’ (Mulfran Press, 2018). Her English translations – including the poem that won the 2016 Stephen Spender award – of renowned Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta were published as ‘Point of Honour’ (also Two Rivers Press, 2019). Lesley works on collaborative projects with visual artists, sculptors, musicians, photographers and dancers as well as other poets. Otherwise, she is a visiting professor at UCL Institute of Education, London, and an honorary research fellow at Oxford University Department of Education.