Sue McIntyre's Green City began life as a random collection of note-like poems about small moments of intensity in the poet’s daily life in London. Starting with an epigraph from US poet Mark Doty “What was our city but wonderful detail?”, this hypnotic poem travels the capital picking out its own details in a quiet love song to the city. From the ‘shining ribbon of song’ of an urban robin to the messages written in Polish on a lamppost memorial, the lighted candles of a wayside shrine to Amy Winehouse, the ‘stickiness on roofs and cars, black gritty gum on pavements, Green City is a poem that, in the words of Keats, invites us to take “part in its existence and pick about the gravel”.

Sue McIntyre's Green City began life as a random collection of note-like poems about small moments of intensity in the poet’s daily life in London. Starting with an epigraph from US poet Mark Doty “What was our city but wonderful detail?”, this hypnotic poem travels the capital picking out its own details in a quiet love song to the city. From the ‘shining ribbon of song’ of an urban robin to the messages written in Polish on a lamppost memorial, the lighted candles of a wayside shrine to Amy Winehouse, the ‘stickiness on roofs and cars, black gritty gum on pavements, Green City is a poem that, in the words of Keats, invites us to take “part in its existence and pick about the gravel”.