Christina the Astonishing

Jane Draycott & Leslie Saunders

illustrated by Peter Hay

1 901677 07 9
paperback

978 1 901677 07 2
(pbk 13 digit ISBN)

1 901677 16 8
hardback

No Editions Currently Available

the Astonishing Christina the Astonishing Christina the Astonishing Christina the Astonishing Christina the Astonishing Christina the Astonishing

 

 

 

 

 

Saint Christina the Astonishing was born into a poor Belgian family in 1150. she ‘died’ aged 22 but at her requiem she rose from her coffin and flew away like a bird, wanting to escape the smell of sinful humanity. This was the first of many mad, disobedient exploits in her long and remarkable life. Jane Draycott and Lesley Saunders retell her story as a woman’s search for psychic self-nourishment.

‘Christina the Astonishing is strange, wild, exhilerating: as in a piece of medieval polyphony the authors mingle their voices, making connections between history and fantasy, between inner life and outer witness. I was intrigued, entertained, and – yes – astonished’
Marina Warner

see images from Christina the Astonishing

read extracts from Jane Draycott's Tideway

read other new poems by Jane Draycott

 

 

 

The tunnel

Ask me what it was like at the end of the tunnel,
if it was white as a moon-surgeon's fingernail,
light as the water out from the crush of the wheel,
as the breast of an owl, too white to enter,
too tight to fit at the lych gate almost,
then there you are, a bride in the garden at Sissinghurst,
up at the summit of Everest, not one step further
to go, white as the snowfall of morphine,
the chalky descent to the house you were born in,
a sheet, a broken back mended, the third day, or roses?

Or was it black, another dark tunnel
crammed in the arse or mouth of the first,
your very own mine-shaft or mad-house of lost
without trace, of no face left on the shroud
to speak of or talk about, black as the bite
the earth takes out of the moon, as the axefall
of slurry, as a mouthful of silence, the heart
of the slag-heap, as hungry, as no chance,
as no hope of getting a word out,
as your own name forgotten, as eaten already.