From here you see it’s flowing left to right —yet pace from one room to the otherand you’d swear the opposite.Light on the muscled play of waterflecks it with dark and silver,depth and surface-shimmer.Willow boles reach down while birds fly upinto a paler sky. This is the fluent placewhere world and mirror touch.Against all reason, we can still believewhat our eyes still tell us: wateris both dark and silver, shallow, deep,absorbing and excluding light;this spreading gleamfrom a broken branch or pile of detritusis an inverted shadow. From the skythe shadow shines, the ripplessmiling as they curl away.
Tamar
Susan Wicks
Feature Date
- April 23, 2023
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“Tamar” from DEAR CRANE: by Susan Wicks.
Published by Bloodaxe Books on 25 February 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Susan Wicks.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Susan Wicks has published eight collections of poetry, five of them with Bloodaxe Books: Dear Crane (2021), The Months (2016), House of Tongues (2011), De-iced (2007) and Night Toad: New & Selected Poems (2003), which includes a selection from three earlier books published by Faber: Singing Underwater, winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize; Open Diagnosis, which was one of the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets titles; and The Clever Daughter, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. The Months, House of Tongues, Night Toad and Singing Underwater are all Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
She has also published three novels, The Key (Faber, 1997), Little Thing (Faber, 1998) and A Place to Stop (Salt, 2012), a short memoir, Driving My Father (Faber, 1995), and a collection of short fiction, Roll Up for the Arabian Derby (Bluechrome, 2008). Her two book-length translations of the French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Cold Spring in Winter (Arc, 2009) and Talking Vrouz (Arc, 2013) have between them won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation, and been shortlisted for the International Griffin Prize for Poetry.
She lives in Kent.
"Opening a book of poetry to find a building site safety notice announcing the presence of a crane which will point itself in the direction of the prevailing wind is the first of many surprises in this ingenious collection. Throughout, the crane swings over the residential area in which it is situated, seemingly scrutinising with its red ‘eye’, and is apostrophised in a series of prose poems headed ‘Dear Crane’, the focal point for a brilliantly realised neighbourhood, the woman and her grandchild at the centre of it, and the passage of time... A fascinating and beautiful collection."
— Frank Startup, The School Librarian
"Wicks can be both a fearless and arrestingly tender kind of writer, unafraid of taking a thought into uncomfortable, raw or unexpected places."
— Paul Farley, PBS Bulletin, on House of Tongues
"Wicks’s poems have a magnificently physical presence… She presents a world which is grounded in reality…but still distinctly susceptible to metamorphosis…not confined to the narrowness of one lifetime, but attentive to the ebb and flow of all life, to all the things that must come round again."
— Chloe Stopa-Hunt, The Poetry Review on The Months
"Few poets writing today go into [family, its personal ties and sorrows] in so detailed and tender a way. Or so frighteningly."
— Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times
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