In a dream landscape radiant with jewels, a father sees his lost daughter on the far bank of a river: 'my pearl, my girl'. One of the great treasures of the British Library, the fourteenth-century poem
Pearl is a work of poetic brilliance; its account of loss and consolation has retained its force across six centuries. Jane Draycott in her new translation remakes the imaginative intensity of the original. This is, Bernard O'Donoghue says in his introduction, 'an event of great significance and excitement', an encounter between medieval tradition and an acclaimed modern poet.
