The Garden of Slender Trust - Tapa blanda

Whitehead's collection and Dalton's (left) were both nominated for England's Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection. Christiania Whitehead's garden is walled like a medieval retreat, a place of imaginative seclusion where she confronts the tensions between a living faith and a lived, sensual life. From this Eden, set within the modern world, its foliage barely veiling the tensions of desire, she emerges with these jewel-like poems from the fight with God. Hers is a poetry as much filled with wonder and transcendence as with the pleasure and perils of flesh and friendship.