Sue Lewis’s Journey has the ability to combine a conversational tone with exquisite phrases and images that surprise without any need for showiness. The quiet elegance of the poems, the sound patterns and pressure on language combine with a sensibility of the fragility of life that nonetheless refuses to be crushed. There’s a yearning ache in these pieces that remains unsentimental and leaves space for what isn’t or can’t be said; an intelligence that pays attention to the deepest connections and celebrates ‘the everyday enchantment’.

from ‘Transmuted’ You are my consolation,
turning up the way you have,
riddling out this burnt and blackened year

and I can’t ask for more.

Spring will come, I know that now. The white magnolias.