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Sarah MaguireSarah Maguire
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Critical perspective
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Biography
The poet and translator Sarah Maguire was born in West London in 1957. After leaving school early, she trained as a gardener before attending university and then becoming a full-time poet and broadcaster. She is a regular contributor to BBC radio arts programmes and former Poet in Residence at Chelsea Physic Garden and at Huntercombe Place Young Offenders' Institution.
Her poetry was first published in 1989 in the series New Chatto Poets: Number Two, with fellow poets: Susanne Ehrhardt, Paul May, Lucy Anne Watt, Robert Crawford and Mark Ford. Her first collection of poetry, Spilt Milk, was published in 1991, followed by The Invisible Mender in 1997. The Florist's at Midnight (2001), a collection of poems about flowers and gardens, includes poems from her first two volumes and a selection of new poems. She has also edited two anthologies, A Green Thought in a Green Shade: Poetry in the Garden (2000), for the Poetry Society, and Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse (2001), a unique selection of seven centuries of poetry in English concerned with plants and flowers, all arranged according to their botanical identities.
The first writer to be sent to Palestine (1996) and Yemen (1998) by the British Council, Sarah has a strong interest in Arabic literature, and she has translated the Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan; the Sudanese poet, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi (2008) and the Afghan poet Naderi Partaw (2008). Sarah is the only living English-language poet with a book in print in Arabic - her selected poems, Haleeb Muraq (2003), - translated by the leading Iraqi poet, Saadi Yousef.
Sarah is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre, which opened in 2004. The PTC emerged from the poetry translation workshops she inaugurated whilst she was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London (2001-2003). Through its unique pairings of leading British poets with linguists, the PTC has translated poets from South Korea to Somaliland (www.poetrytranslation.org).
She is also the co-translator of the Afghan novelist, Atiq Rahimi's book, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear (2006).
Her latest collection is The Pomegranates of Kandahar (2007), shortlisted for the 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, she received a Cholmondeley Award.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Poetry, Translation
Bibliography
New Chatto Poets: Number Two/Susanne Ehrhardt, Paul May, Lucy Anne Watt, Robert Crawford, Sarah Maguire and Mark Ford Chatto & Windus, 1989
Spilt Milk Secker & Warburg, 1991
The Invisible Mender Cape, 1997
A Green Thought in a Green Shade: Poetry in the Garden Poetry Society, 2000
Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse (editor) Chatto & Windus, 2001
The Florist's at Midnight Cape, 2001
Haleeb Muraq (Selected Poems) (translated by Saadi Yousef) Al-Mada House (Syria), 2003
A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear/Atiq Rahimi (translator with Yama Yari) Chatto & Windus, 2006
The Pomegranates of Kandahar Chatto & Windus, 2007
Poems/Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi (translator with Sabry Hafez) Enitharmon/Poetry Translation Centre, 2008
Poems/Naderi Partaw (translator with Yama Yari) Enitharmon/Poetry Translation Centre, 2008
Prizes and awards
2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) (shortlist - 'Passages')
2007 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) The Pomegranates of Kandahar
2008 Cholmondeley Award
Critical Perspective
Sarah Maguire is a leading London-based poet who does readings all over the U.K. and abroad, is active as a translator and reviewer, and frequently appears on BBC Radio. In 1998 she became a Poet in Residence at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and thereby started to assemble the contents of her recently published anthology Flora Poetica (2001), bringing together poems about flowers and plants in their botanical 'families', by poets from the fourteenth century to the present day. There are many creative juxtapositions: thus Wordsworth's famous daffodils contrast with a poem by Michael Longley; Blake's sunflower sits near Allen Ginsberg's; while the thirty poems about roses take readers on a journey from love to revolution. Maguire includes a healthy number of poems by women, unearthing some lovely eighteenth century specimens, as well as works by Sylvia Plath ('Among the Narcissi'), Emily Dickinson, and her own contemporaries such as Louise Gluck and Kathleen Jamie. It's also very much a world anthology, with the homegrown riches of British poetry set alongside poets from the Caribbean, Australia, Africa and elsewhere. As Maguire remarks, 'It's impossible to grasp the significance of plants (and flowers) in British culture without grasping the centrality of colonialism'.
Maguire's own poetry has been partly informed from the 1970s onwards by her involvement with the women's movement and awareness of gender issues. When interviewing the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich in the 'New Generation Poets' issue of Poetry Review in 1994 she remarked 'Women poets of my generation are all writing in [her] wake ... because she's changed our agenda'. Maguire has also maintained that, 'for women to write poetry... it's necessary to move from being the object of poetry to being its subject'. Her work has been influenced by her interest in literary and cultural theory and by global politics. She is unusually well-travelled within the Arab world, this being alluded to in 'Hibiscus' and 'Jasmine in Yemen', and she has been vocal in support of the Palestinian cause. She has translated Palestinian and other Arabic poets into English.
Her work is, however, far from being aridly 'political'. Her emphasis on the body and on pleasure (at times a guilty pleasure) places lyricism within an historical and political sense. Moving easily as they do, often with short lines or verse paragraphs, her poems may be about travels or staying in at home with a lover, drinking and eating. They can be lushly descriptive, or cast a sardonic eye upon romance and sex, especially their aftermath. Her poems can allude to family relationships, symbolised by a childhood earwax blockage ('The Hearing Cure'); or simply be about things seen while walking her native London, from industrial architecture to bird-life. Most prevalently, she writes about gardens, plants, and above all flowers - whether as metaphors for female sexuality, images of past colonialism, or just enjoyed for their own beauty and scents. As Gillian Allnutt has pointed out in Poetry Review, Maguire's poems 'delight in the precise vocabularies of botany', and the most formative influence upon her writing was very likely her early training as a gardener. Her working life began at the age of seventeen in the London borough of Ealing's Parks Department - experiences reflected in poems such as 'Watershed' and 'The Tree Bank at Ten': 'nothing but tasks, / tasks, in this factory of trees / ... till my spine is a fine blade / of fire / and both palms / sting in the morning air'.
Writing of Spilt Milk, her first collection in 1991, Maguire herself remarked that it's a very 'oral' book, full of consuming passions: for fruit, aubergines, 'erotic whiskey tasting', even semen in the title poem ('good and bitter milk'). The book's title, an ironic angle on the proverbial phrase 'no use crying over spilt milk', reinforces its underlying subject, implying regrets over mistakes in life and losses in love. As sources of consolation and refreshment, Maguire poems start to linger in gardens: 'May Day 1986' may begin with a casual note of hedonism ('I am sitting / in a walled garden, drinking gin') but goes on to deflate this, as fallout from the Chernobyl disaster threatens the idyll. 'A Formal Garden' takes a male persona, describing 'its finest York stone, / And small, precise topiaries / Of box and yew, the gravel / Raked into line'. 'The garden of the Virgin', describes the myths and history associated with a Greek island garden, in which Mary walks 'inhaling its aromas, / gathering the blooms / of oleander and hibiscus'. Maguire also has an elegiac note at the passing of time and of relationships: 'All the places we made love / have been pulled down / or converted into something healthier'. Her most anthologised poem is perhaps 'Mushrooms à la Greque', the ending of a love affair typified by a meal having to be thrown away, leaving 'an irritation in the u-bend / or something stirring in the colon, / urgent for release'.
The Guardian newspaper's critic Robert Potts noted when reviewing The Invisible Mender (1997) that, for Maguire, 'emotions are played out through bone, blood and sinew. Her tone is quiet, controlled and penetrating'. These are perhaps her most emotional poems, often about a belated sense of grief at the mother-child relationship. The title poem memorialises her 'first mother', who left thirty-seven years ago: 'and I know that I'll not know / if you still are mending in the failing light, / or if your hands (as small as mine) / lie still now, clasped together, underground'. One also finds symbols of love and loss: 'At seventeen I hadn't seen an artichoke. / Nowadays I've learnt the ritual / of stripping back the tight-packed petalled head / to unsleeve the longed-for heart' ('Tidemarks'). The volume contains a lyric cycle of poems freely adapted from the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva that includes the line: 'My grief is the grief of a motherless child'.
The Florist's at Midnight, published in 2001 to tie-in with Flora Poetica, is a slender but sumptuous volume drawn from her first two books, together with some new works. The fine title poem finds the viewer looking in at a florist's shop, 'rain printing the tarmac / the streetlights / in pieces / on the floor'. Inside, arum lilies, tulips and dahlias have been 'cloistered in cellophane / ...cargoed across continents', international commodities. Having started out at home in the rainy city, the poems then travel the world - to Marrakech, Yemen ('a garland of jasmine / through the shattered car window), even to 'Trotsky's Garden' in Mexico. Flowers may be symbolic, as in 'Africa Violet' ('veiled flesh...pierced at the heart / ...crimson of the vulnerable underleaves / intimate as a mouth'). But 'Zaatar' (Arab word for the herb thyme) stands in for a bitter history: 'pollen like gunpowder / dust in the hand / cast over Palestine / from the mouths of stones'. These twenty-three poems neatly epitomise Maguire's subjects: gardens, politics, travel, love and loss, all under modern hothouse conditions.
Dr Jules Smith, 2003
Contact information
Related links
http:/ / www.poetrytranslation.org
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