Susan Wicks – författare

The Months is a book of poems about time - not only the attritions of time, its ageings, conflicts and illnesses, but also, and more importantly, the kind of time the French philosopher Bergson called 'duration', a human time that speeds up or slows, expands and contracts, measured by perceptual rather than scientific laws. At the centre of the collection, the long title-poem interweaves material from two pregnancies spanning two generations: these months open themselves up to insecurities and dreams, culture, myths, everyday realities and moments of fear or delight. The two births that end this compelling narrative take the book in a new direction, to a time and place where it is possible to stand still and watch a saucepan drying on a draining-board or cycle round a mountainous island at age sixty, laugh at oneself, or even begin again.

A 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.

Susan Wicks' poetry transforms the apparently ordinary into something precise, surprising and revelatory. These new poems are a departure for her, exploring 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. Many of the poems are about escaping - in a car loaded with stolen meat or in the de-iced plane of the title - an escape that takes us first to the snow-bound world of the central MacDowell Winter sequence, and then, in her seriously playful Graham Mickleworth poems, in search of the now-you-see-them-now-you-don't family of a fictional painter. For running away is also running towards, even a kind of pilgrimage, to a place where art and experience, past and future, merge and find ways to survive.