Pauline Stainer was selected for the 1994 New Generation Poets promotion. In 1996 her fourth collection The Wound-dresser's Dream was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. The Honeycomb (1989), Sighting the Slave Ship (1992) and The Ice-Pilot Speaks (1994) were all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She won first prize in the Stroud Festival poetry competition in 1984, and has won major awards in several other competitions, including the TLS and the King's Lynn, Cheltenham, Leek, Hastings and York festival competitions. In 1987 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. She is a freelance writer and tutor. After many years in rural Essex and then on the Orkney island of Rousay, she now lives at Hadleigh in Suffolk.

About The Lady & The Hare:

"Pauline Stainer is one of those few, electrifying poets who truly, strangely, change our perceptions."
—Vuyelwa Carlin, Poetry Wales

"Pauline Stainer is a poet 'working at the margins of the sacred', conveying sensations 'with an economy of means that is breathtaking' (John Burnside). The Lady & the Hare distils poetry of rare luminosity from her five previous books. 'Stainer writes sacred poetry for the scientific 21st Century. She is deeply English and draws from a wealth of sources: medieval lyrics, Eastern as well as Western art, Christian liturgy... chemistry and optics'"
—Anne Stevenson

"Her territory is predominantly that of legend: its symbols and its creatures — the unicorn, the falcon, the serpent — but she often draws them into a contemporary setting where they neither shed power nor lose meaning. Her purpose is not so much to import the ancient world into the modern as to demonstrate that those worlds are of a piece: that old rituals still obtain, that old beliefs still govern instinct...Stainer's is a poetry rich in symbol, and full of intensive observations of the physical (sex, birth, death); it is anchored to the idea of mineral and animal as part of the numinous."
—David Harsent, PBS Bulletin

"So authentic an imaginative utterance as to have about it the inevitability of true art."
—John Lucas, New Statesman