Lawrence Sail is a freelance writer, he has published eight collections of poems, most recently Out of Land: New & Selected Poems (1992), Building into Air (1995), and The World Returning (2002), all from Bloodaxe Books. He has compiled and edited a number of anthologies, including First and Always: Poems for Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (Faber & Faber, 1988) and (with Kevin Crossley-Holland) The New Exeter Book of Riddles (Enitharmon, 1999). His poems have been broadcast on radio and television, and he also wrote a radio play. He reviews for Poetry Review and contributes a regular comumn to PN Review.

About The World Returning:

"Peter Forbes has called Sail 'a lyric poet in the classic mould'. The World Returning adds to the achievement of Out of Land: New & Selected Poems(1992) and Building into Air(1995). These are poems haunted by disharmony, by a sense of edges and endings, the silence after music...marvellous exotic miniatures, enamelled models of perception."
—Times Literary Supplement

"The World Returning is 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

"Unalloyed good writing...Sail's work is certainly tender. 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, Poetry Review

"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, Poetry Review