The Garden of Slender Trust

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 from the fight with God with these jewel-like poems. Hers is a poetry as much filled with wonder and transcendence as with the pleasures and perils of flesh and friendship. The Garden of Slender Trust was Christiania Whitehead's first and only book of poems, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.