Wildlife

Hiya Lovelies! I hope you are adjusting to the change in season and have been reading poetry and buying poetry books  and supporting lots of indie bookshops and poetry publishers for today's National Poetry Day and Saturday's Bookshop Day! I have been adding gigs to the calendar and layers to my wardrobe in preparation for taking Windfalls out of the Zoom sphere and back to some in person events and I am very much looking forward to sharing the new poems with you in my favourite way... Here are some dates for your diary, on and offline: Saturday 9 October - 12.30 - 1.30pm: Knighton Festival Join us for a free festival session online at Knighton Festival between 12.30 and 1pm with poet Susie Wild sharing from her new collection Windfalls first followed by a short Q&A and then novelist Gary Raymond talking about his new novel Angels of Cairo and answering questions from 1 - 1.30 pm. Book your free tickets: https://www.knightoncommunitycentre.com/tickets.html Saturday 16 Oc

This latest collection by Susie Wild is substantial, touching, entertaining and very fresh; it is also a handsome production. Susie Wild is known for her live readings and the poems have an immediacy and accessibility which suggest this.  The collection is in two parts: ‘The Carnivore Boyfriends’ and ‘Windfalls’. While the title poem of the first section is generally humorous, the last line suggests a history of bad experiences which is certainly born out in some of the later poems. Some are tender remembrances of early days, like ‘Brockley Cross’ or Wild’s hymn to her childhood bicycles, but ‘This Is Why We Can’t’ and ‘Traumatic Language’ evoke a seriously over-controlling partner, and ‘Newly Single’ the threat of rape or worse. The indirect language of this poem captures the small steps, doubts and excuses which end with ‘[p]erhaps you should / have pressed charges. Spoken to someone. / But you didn’t.’  There are some brilliant portraits here of men, like ‘Burton’s Boy’ (‘a fuck

  Oh to be swimming in Greece… Windfalls is out now from Parthian and all good bookshops.

I meant to post this yesterday… it is the season for windfalls so here is one for you from Mid Wales, appropriate to our journeying yesterday. Windfalls is out now through Parthian.

NEWSFLASH! I have been booked to do a real life gig. I'll be joining Patrick jones on the stage at Crickhowell Literary Festival on Saturday 16 October at 6pm. Do come along! Patrick Jones and Susie Wild – Fuse, Fracture and Windfalls Patrick Jones has been a significant voice in Welsh poetry for twenty-five years. In this new edition of Fuse Fracture he engages with the energy and passion that has made his work stand out. Susie Wild's second collection Windfalls are tales from unexpected events, funny, perceptive and sometimes wild. Book tickets on eventbrite

  125 years ago today Mademoiselle Albertina's body was found near Nash. Her grave in the local cemetery called to me on a walk this week, pulling me a different route round – through conservation woodland onto a grassy, bramble-lined path, curving past the first blackened berries tart to taste. And then, there she was, the freshly cleaned headstone gleaming white in the heatwave sun.  Here's my poem about her from my new collection Windfalls , out now through Parthian Books :

Caroline Bracken reviews Windfalls for Nation.Cymru, I think she liked it....  'The word ‘windfall’ reminds me of Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘A Kite for Aibhín’ which ends or lands on that magical word. While they are very different poets, Susie Wild has something of Heaney’s lyric sensibility, an ability to capture a moment others might pass by [...] The love poems in the second section of the book are some of the strongest, gorgeous, unsentimental portraits, ‘He was a cupped hand/ to the cigarettes she’d quit// but taken up again’ (‘Everyone Got Married’) [...] Pandemic poems are a new popular phenomenon but I challenge anyone to write a better one than Susie Wild’s ‘How quickly we forget to live.’ I'm in good company too with collections by Dai George and Ilse Pedler also reviewed. Read the article in full on Nation.Cymru