Collected Poems

Purcell Sally

Containing all her published work along with over 70 uncollected poems, this is the definitive edition of a poet with a growing body of admirers. Clive Wilmer spoke of "the ghostly music" of Sally Purcell's poetry and described her first book as "a miracle of chaste perfection". These qualities remained constant in her work. Often drawing on folklore and mediaeval sources, her poems are tense yet fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a sense of the numinous.

About the Author

Sally Purcell was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire in 1944. She studied Mediaeval and Modern French at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and continued to live and work in Oxford (as typist, barmaid, researcher and, above all, writer) until her death in 1998. A specialist in mediaeval literature, she edited selections of George Peele and Charles d'Orleans and was the translator of a selection of Provencal Poems. Her main collections of poetry are "The Holly Queen" (1971), "Dark of Day" (1977), "Fossil Unicorn" (1997) and "Collected Poems" (2002).

Reviews

"...Sally's prodigious range of allusion is light-fingered; and always voiced through her own unique sensibility. Her wide knowledge lives in the delicate mesh of her language... The poems seem to me to grow stronger, with some of the finest of all among the uncollected found after her death" – from the Preface by Marina Warner

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