Bøker av Sue Finch

On entering this Museum of a Life, feel free to wander at will. However, don't miss a single gallery, as every exhibit invokes a small part of the life of Sue Finch. By the time you leave the museum for the Gift Shop to buy a blue apple for a loved one, you will know her well..'Sue Finch's voice is both steady and questioning as she sets down the archive of her life museum and invites you to lean in for a closer look. Each exhibit feels like a very personal and off-kilter chronicle of a collective memory where wolves and silence stand with their backs to the corners of the theatrical space of a museum cabinet in which Smurfs and giraffes have walk-on parts. And it's well worth imagining the gift shop - that unsettling pelican's disco moves stencilled on a tea towel; a postcard steeped in the metal taste of the narrator's own blood.' - Helen Ivory..'Ponds, pitfalls, pandemics, peacocks, pelicans and funeral preparations. On view in Sue Finch's second collection is a kaleidoscope of memory, moments, fears and desires, curated in a lyrical museum with spotlights on circus tents, taxidermy tables, distant dreams and swirling nightmares. The recollections are residues on the tip of the tongue, the names of each already faded, fallen or pulled like the pelt from the flesh with only a metallic tang left in its wake and the future is a disco very deep in the woods with tunes yet to be identified. This is a Daliesque ramble through the gardens of life, an asymmetrical, syncopated joyride. Welcome to the Museum of a Life is triumphant with its directions, distractions and dancing Deathwatch Beetles. Buy a ticket in advance to spare yourself the disappointment of this museum being sold out!' - Damien B Donnelly..'At once mindful and surreal, these poems take us on a journey through the Museum of a Life, passing from childhood, through vivid everyday events, to love and dreams, and to considerations of mortality. The intriguing exhibits include the small but profound miracle of a tortoise waking from hibernation, the revelation of night skies in the armpits of a lover, a poet rescuing a giraffe after an earthquake, a dancing pelican and other such wonders. Like all the best museums, this one does not have too many rules, and we can walk amongst and interact with the poems at will. Sue Finch welcomes us into a world of multisensory surround sound. Unsentimental yet tender, this collection is an original and imaginative celebration of the temporary treasures of life, and of the human condition.' - Ivor Daniel.

It all began in 2021 when I saw an elastic band on the ground and to me it looked like a treble clef. I photographed it, gave it the title 'Variation on a Treble Clef in Shadow', and posted it on social media. Later that year on one of my daily walks I saw a shoelace that looked like an elephant hawk moth caterpillar, and then a little further down the road an elastic band resembling the mirror image of a six which I called 'Not a Roll of the Die'. I then seemed to notice elastic bands quite often whilst out on walks, and I loved the way my snapshots could turn them into something more than discarded rubber bands. The challenge I set myself was to create the title for each photograph in the time it took to capture the image and edit it to a square photo on my phone. I loved finding the bands in places where they would not be expected, such as The Great Orme and Loggerheads Country Park. A couple of friends started to notice my elastic band photos and commented on them positively. One friend took a trip to Australia to see her daughters and sent me a photograph of a purple elastic band, which became 'In a Puddle by the Laundry Shed in the Garden'. The connection across the miles was wonderful and the colour in these photos contrasted well with the greyer images I was photographing in Wales. In the same way as finding the detail in the little things by tweeting something I noticed on the way to work each morning during lockdown, these photographs gave me a focus for finding something unique within an ordinary moment in time. There is a marking of time within them that is matched by the poems written for each full moon of 2022. I love the fact that these photographs and poems have now been set down in a book.

Sue Finch''s debut collection Magnifying Glass focuses the lens on moments in time and carries the reader from childhood through to adulthood. The title poem recalls one of her brother''s experiments in the garden with his new magnifying glass and its ability to focus sunlight to make fire. The poems are at times dark (Hare Mother reflects on a woman leaving an abusive relationship), occasionally twisted (The Red Shoes is a fairy tale inspired poem that begins with a meeting in a shoe shop) and often poignant (No Second Chance recounts an autobiographical moment where poor use of an axe to chop wood has unforeseen consequences). The final poem, Graphene, is a love poem as well as a celebration of carbon atoms.Sue Finch''s poems are flesh on the skeletons of folktales. They are inhabited by creatures who breathe quietly in the human dusk. They are tender, straight-talking, yet can catch you off-guard with their slanted pathways.  Helen IvorySue Finch is a writer of great versatility. Her wide repertoire includes poems that startle and shock with their strong themes (suicide, heartache, trauma within the family), and also quirkier, observational poems, poems which celebrate a star gazing brother, or try to bring the moon down from the sky for a lover. What all her poems have in common however, is a charge and electric current, language that (in the words of Dylan Thomas) lifts off the page, vivid and immersive imagery and a rich musicality and a fresh new reading of fairytale and ancient tales.To read Sue is to be transported to other worlds, not just the gorgeous yet unsettling lands of the Hare Mother, the Red Shoes or a traumatised Rapunzel, but to worlds in which the everyday is transformed into the stuff of myth and legend.A glorious and transcendent read from a poet with a fiercely original vision of the world, and a strongly developed imagination.Anna Saunders, Cheltenham Poetry Festival Founding Director. ∩╗┐''Sue Finch''s poems have the ability both to beguile and shock you with their humour, tenderness and darkness. Her confident dexterity with language and voice scoops the reader up and deposits them firmly in the world of her poems, whether that be family history, domesticity or an old fairy tale seen through new eyes. Sue''s writing is vivid; it''s curious. Her poems question and challenge the reader to be curious too; it''s a challenge well worth accepting.'' Georgi Gill, Editor, The Interpreter''s House.