Lawrence Sail is a freelance writer, and a former chairman of the Arvon Foundation. He has been programme director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature and a Whitbread Prize judge, and won a Cholmondeley Award for his poetry in 2004. His earlier work is collected in Out of Land: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 1992), and he has since published three new collections with Bloodaxe, Building into Air (1995), The World Returning (2002), and Eye-Baby (2006).

About Eye-Baby:

"Sail’s centre field is an intimate, intelligent and wholly human place…Despite a climate of linguistic shifts and ironies, people continue to feel simply, directly and, sometimes, devastatingly"
—George Szirtes

"Witty, memorable and rich in feeling. The emotional truth of these poems is lit up by a rare buoyancy of vision, and line after line strikes with fresh, original force"
—Helen Dunmore

"Disturbances, threats and doubts are confronted in his poems, but there is an equally vivid tendency towards celebration…There is a genuine presence of affection in his writing, of world-love and enjoyments"
—Douglas Dunn

"You should read Lawrence Sail. He doesn’t write like anyone else. A reliable, experienced poet, his eyes are always open. He misses nothing, and he offers no easy answers, but his gaze is invariably compassionate. His writing teaches us how 'the heart can blossom, even in the heavy earth of here and now'...We need such poetry in these tricky times"
—R.V. Bailey