dare I be gentle
A collection of deep and personal poems .
” I want to live/ in the quiet of an inbreath/ between lines/ where commas and dots silently/ punctately/ stop everything.”
This is a deeply felt poetry, intense and personal. But is it not poetry that depends on the reader being aware of the circumstances that gave rise to it. Rather, it allows the intensity of the poet’s experience, and her contemplation of that experience, to shine through the words sensitively and skilfully patterned on the page. This is the proper business of poetry,and Susan Hitching is a true poet. As she says herself, in lines that aspiring poets would do well to contemplate: I want to live/ in the quiet of an inbreath/ between lines/ where commas and dots silently/ punctuately/ stop everything.
Paddy Bushe https://portraidi.ie/en/paddy-bushe/
Susan Hitching’s poems display a startling lyrical acuity. Her vision is attuned to the fine detail of the world which enriches her poems with clear, precise and truly suprising imagery. The poems enter their subjects through language-play and movement. Her instinct for word choice coupled with her awareness of the latent power of white space make for poems that are powerful and active: everything is in flux; on the move. At work here is a visual language that resonates beyond words themselves. A language that reverberates as an after-echo in the memory of the reader and marks Hitching’s distinctivenes as a poet. Read this book and experience first-hand what sorcery lies between finger and key.
Eileen Sheehan
https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-23096_Sheehan
1st Prize of the Jer Lynch Poetry Award Ballydonoghue Bardic Festival 2022 published in Irish Wildlife Trust Magazine
Curlew of Cloghane
They flute whilst
wading the sea-frills
dib-dibbling for sand-worms.
Striding on fragile stilts:
to dig the clouds, sythe the sun…
and treading the blue …in glassy sands
they are swimming in sky….
or dancing to the lap-lap rythm
of gentle a back-wash.
Cloghane…. with its mournful pipers
threading phrases on the wind…
tightening those ghostly strings.
