Having been the love of a brilliant British spy and a lonely Indian King. The war which shaped so many destinies helped shape the emerging artist in Shänne Sands.Īs a teenager she studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama falling deeply in love, a love that broke when she was nineteen and hurled her life into the turmoil from which she emerged with two children born of Indian fathers, a body of early work including Grass, started when she was seventeen and finished when was eighteen.

She calls out of the bark and roots of trees a magical tune and texture of the human spirit that connects us to the minute as well as to the colossal moments of life.Ī young child in World War Two she spent the war in Cornwall where she says, she found her soul wandering the cliff tops and beaches of Porthtowan on the north coast. Hers is a brilliant seam between the old masters and the best of the contemporary, combining both as a call to both.

To me she is the most accomplished Poet of our times. She is a master of tone and as gritty as sand as the words awaken the dullness of our senses and make us feel the world about us, its sadness, its joys, death and life. Although Yeats is a favorite of mine, and I enjoy teaching him, he is a bit out there with his gyre and allusiveness. She is here and now in her poetry, and her imagery and diction resonate like lightning throughout the senses. I think she has the voice of Dickinson but better, and also the loaded details of a T.S. I hear the voice of Emily Dickinson, but the imagery is more of what society can respond to and understand in their bones. Shänne Sands' poems speak more than Yeats to today's world.

Fidelity Is for Swans by Shänne Sands