Her Orchards

What is it to inhabit the earth, to imagine what’s beyond it, to grasp the livingness of things, the brightness of the moment? Sue Leigh’s poems are made of particularities. A woman weaves a basket, a painter catches the brief flight of a bird, a sculptor works with limestone once under the sea. In our looking, in our making, we may find and lose ourselves.There are objects from the past: a Romano-British stone votive relief, a medieval roodscreen, a sampler stitched by a child in the nineteenth century. And what are they to us here, now? The poet suggests that ‘time is neither here nor there.’In poems about travel over land and sea and to the moon, she depicts our restless, necessary, spirited journeys into being and ways of being. She comes home always to the shelter and the nourishment of orchards of her own.‘Sue Leigh’s poems have the art of simplicity. She catches that strange thing – the clarity of the unsaid. Her writing has the depth of unearthing, ripening, slipping into the last of the light.’ — Pauline StainerFrom a review of Chosen Hill:‘Many of these poems read as meditations on how to exist in the world, and how we might accept the chance happenings of life’—The Times Literary Supplement