Publisher's Synopsis
Ruth Fainlight's poems 'give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events' (A.S. Byatt). Each poem is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. The key image of this collection is burning wire, expressing both illumination and blindness, tension and release, danger and judgement. These astonishing and delightful poems range through time and space from Sheba's journey towards her fateful meeting with Solomon, to Montevideo in the 1920s, a palace garden outside Lisbon, and a present-day Somerset village. In Burning Wire, the acuteness and subtlety of Ruth Fainlight's perceptions are as sharp and careful as in all her highly achieved work.
