Colour of Rain

Susan Utting was born in South London, moved twenty times in forty years, then settled, after a fashion, in Berkshire. She is the founder of Reading’s long-running, acclaimed Poets’ Café, which she still regularly hosts. Her awards include an Arts Council Laureateship, a Poetry Business Prize, The Berkshire Poetry Prize, The Peterloo Prize, and a writing fellowship at Reading’s School of English and American Literature. She was a winner in the Bristol International Short Story Competition for 2018, and she was selected by the London Poetry Library to be recorded for Poetry International at the South Bank Centre.

‘Whether she is being a willow or imagining a sister, considering miracles, or reflecting upon family, Susan Utting’s poems are never less than delicately wrought, with a lovely ability to open out their language like Japanese flowers placed in a bowl of water. There is much arboreal meditation here, around which this poet weaves a deeply felt empathy with nature; there are dreamscapes, and portraits of animals and birds; there are witty encounters with weather. Beautifully observant throughout, and often employing an intent edge to their perceptions, these poems draw the reader most adeptly in to their realised world’ – Penelope Shuttle; ‘Susan Utting’s gloriously gathered language susurrates across the page like a spell. With it, she lifts up a corner of ourselves, reminding us of the menace of childhood landscapes, and the fairytale-dark memories we might have left buried there. But these wise and emotionally generous poems are also an incantation for healing, and she shows us how the walls we build around ourselves can be dismantled by the salve inherent in nature’s fundamentals – trees, sea, sky, snow, “the world’s rainbow”’ – Dawn Gorman