Pauline Stainer is a poet 'working at the margins of the sacred', conveying sensations 'with an economy of means that is breathtaking...her poems are not merely artefacts, they have an organic life of their own' (John Burnside). As in all her books, the luminous poems of her ninth collection Sleeping under the Juniper Tree are minimal but highly charged - with presences and hauntings, sensing the spirit incarnate in every part of the living world.

"Over the past 20 years, Pauline Stainer has all but perfected the art of illumination without demystification, in search of what she calls "the divining shiver", a phrase that can only gesture towards the combination of physical immediacy and numinous wonder that her marvellous poems possess... Stroke by stroke, apprehension by apprehension, Stainer is building a unique and extraordinary body of work." - Guardian

"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." - PBS Bulletin