Description
Book SynopsisFair’s Fair, Susan Utting’s third full poetry collection has been described as `joyous, heartbreaking, ramm’d with life’. In these poems dead creatures (a stuffed bird, a taxidermist’s zebra) and people (a lovable, garrulous old man, a strange, moon-faced woman) come back to life. The graveyard dead join in the partying and after-hours drinking in the village pub; a lament becomes a celebration of life. Full of desires and ambitions – some fulfilled, some thwarted, from learning to read to reaching the moon, from shape-shifting to living without mirrors – poems are paired to speak to, or reflect each other. Themes and stories chain-react and echo throughout the book in Utting’s trademark rich vocabulary, strong rhythms and distinctive patterns of sound. Fair’s Fair continues to fulfil Adrian Mitchell’s description of Susan Utting’s work: `Her poems are musical, magical and have a clarity which goes straight to the heart.’
Trade Review‘One of the many rewards of Fair’s Fair lies in the way Susan Utting weaves the details of teeth, needlework and cocktail umbrellas into the pulse of the rumba. These poems shimmy in the mind long after closing the cover’ — Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Elegiac and sensuous, pressing and haunting in their almost hallucinatory narrative detail, the poems in Fair’s Fair reveal Susan Utting’s capacity to move us at its most powerful yet – a new collection of great skill and lucid tenderness.’ — Jane Draycott
