Böcker av Susan Wicks

A giant crane appears at the back windows of a residential street, its red 'eye' overlooking lives on the other side of the glass where Susan Wicks writes searchingly about our ordinary existence, its serendipities and unreliable sense-impressions. By the time the crane leaves, the landscape we knew will have changed and we too will have moved on.

Susan Wicks's seventh collection is a considerable literary achievement: a book of poems about time whose central title-poem weaves together two pregnancies spanning two generations.

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2006. This work features poems that explore the cracks in our experience - between movement and stasis, the everyday reality that surrounds us and what we perceive of it, between what our bodies experience and what can or can't be captured in paint or ink.

Susan Wicks' poetry transforms the apparently ordinary into something precise, surprising, and revelatory. The new poems in Night Toad move outwards from the intimacy of personal loss to a wider landscape haunted by disappearance--a French Flanders still scarred by successive wars, the woman pen pal of a prisoner on Death Row, an old woman with dementia lost in the woods, the absent keeper of an unmanned Cornish lighthouse. As well as a whole new collection, this volume also includes a generous selection of work from her three previous collections: Singing Underwater. Open Diagnosis, and The Clever Daughter, which was short-listed for both the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. She has also published two novels and a memoir.

House of Tongues is concerned with acceptance and refusal, power and the lack of it, silence and the refusal of silence. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.