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