Sarah Maguire
Encyclopedia
Life
Sarah Maguire left school early to train as a gardener with the London Borough of Ealing (1974–1977). Her horticultural career has had a significant impact on her poetry: her third collection of poems The Florist's at Midnight (Jonathan Cape, 2001) brought together all her poems about plants and gardens, and she edited the anthology, Flora Poetica: the Chatto Book of Botanical Verse (2001). She was also Poet in Residence at Chelsea Physic Garden.Maguire was the first writer to be sent to Palestine (1996) and Yemen (1998) by the British Council
British Council
The British Council is a United Kingdom-based organisation specialising in international educational and cultural opportunities. It is registered as a charity both in England and Wales, and in Scotland...
. As a result of these visits she developed a strong interest in Arabic literature; she has translated the Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet...
and Ghassan Zaqtan and the Sudanese poet, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi
Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi
Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi is a poet from Sudan who writes his work in Arabic. writing in Arabic. Published in The London Review of Books, his work Poem of the Nile was the first time an African poet had been capture in that work.-External links:...
(2008). With Yama Yari Sarah co-translated the Afghan poet Partaw Naderi (2008); their translation of A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear by the leading Afghan novelist, Atiq Rahimi
Atiq Rahimi
Atiq Rahimi is a French-Afghan writer and film-maker.-Life:He was born in 1962 in Kabul to a senior public servant and attended high school in Lycée Esteqlal...
(Chatto & Windus, 2006) was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support...
in 2007.
She is the only living English-language poet with a book in print in Arabic - her selected poems, Haleeb Muraq (Dar-Al Mada, 2003), was translated by the leading Iraqi poet, Saadi Yousef. Maguire is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre
Poetry Translation Centre
The Poetry Translation Centre was is an organization dedicated to translating poetry from Africa, Asia and Latin America. It was founded by the British poet Sarah Maguire in 2004...
, which opened in 2004.
Awards
- 2008 Cholmondeley AwardCholmondeley AwardThe Cholmondeley Award is an annual award for poetry given by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. Awards honour distinguished poets, from a fund endowed by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966...
- 2001-2003 Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow School of Oriental & African Studies University of LondonUniversity of London-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
Reviews
...The opening poem, "The Grass Church at Dilston Grove", inspired by an artwork which sowed grass seeds all over a disused church in London's docklands, encapsulates the strengths of this book. The diligent description of the scent and appearance of the living grass and the abandoned building gives way to self-contemplation, then to beautifully deployed rhythms of ritual incantation, and finally to a moment poised perfectly between self and oblivion: laden with the inevitability of death, yet balanced perfectly by quiet, determined, resourceful life.
...The ‘magical thread’ in The Bell JarThe Bell JarThe Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed...
is suggestive in terms of the recurrent imagery of Sarah Maguire’s fourth collection, The Pomegranates of Kandahar (and Maguire begins with an epigraph from Plath’s ‘The Bee Meeting’ – a clue to the pervasive presence of the American poet throughout the book.) At the close of ‘Solstice’, Maguire writes ‘Because I have lost you, I must take up this thread’...This kind of stitching together has been seen before, most obviously perhaps in another poet who shares Maguire’s botanical and ecological preoccupations, Michael LongleyMichael LongleyMichael Longley, CBE is a Northern Irish poet from Belfast.-Life and career:Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus...
.