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.