Description
Book SynopsisA giant crane appears at the back windows of a residential street, its beam swinging freely, its red ‘eye’ seeming to overlook the lives on the other side of the glass. In her eighth collection of poems, Susan Wicks writes searchingly about our ordinary existence, its serendipities and unreliable sense-impressions, its delight in a new generation, its brief escapes – but this earthbound perspective is also part of an implicit dialogue. Under the crane new buildings spring up, seasons shift, perspective varies, until, its work completed, the giant machine is ready to be driven away. By the time it leaves, the landscape we knew will have changed and we too will have moved on.
Trade ReviewWicks 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] *
Table of Contents9 Dear Crane 10 High Wind 11 For the Blind 12 Tamar 13 The Romance of Steam 14 Crane 15 Dear Crane 16 Feeding the Ducks 17 Driving to Dorking 18 Separation Anxiety 19 Free Slew 20 Dear Crane 22 Look 23 Emergency 24 Parable 25 Two Tractors 26 Perhaps 27 Dear Crane 31 Paint 32 Over the Old Station 33 Two Trains 34 Halfway 35 Explaining Snow 36 Dear Crane 40 Stacked Planes, 5.30 a.m. 42 Dicky Ticker 44 Midwich Cuckoo 45 M25 46 The Old Cemetery, Cove 47 Dear Crane 50 Clubbercise 51 Elderly Bathing Solutions 52 Rhubarb 53 Maine, End of Summer 54 After the Lobster Feast 55 Dear Crane 57 Sirinas 58 Reading Scott Fitzgerald at the Gorgona 60 Olive tree with Clothes-pegs 61 Leaving Alikí 62 Credo 63 Sunset at Karnagio 64 Marble Beach, with Crane 65 Dear Crane 69 After a Daughter’s Miscarriage 71 The Road to Bardigues 72 On the Day of the Royal Wedding 73 Lopped Trees 74 Windmill above Golfech 75 Dear Crane 78 The Sunday Hunters 79 Robert Singing 80 Notes
