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). Several sequences in The Wound-dresser's Dream her fourth collection inhabit an imaginative borderland inspired by her `visceral Muse' including elegies explorations of light and music and the title-poem itself (drawn from Keats' fancy to become a ship's surgeon). Shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award.