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Sue Finch’s debut collection Magnifying Glass focuses the lens on moments in time and carries the reader from childhood through to adulthood. The title poem recalls one of her brother’s experiments in the garden with his new magnifying glass and its ability to focus sunlight to make fire. The poems are at times dark (Hare Mother reflects on a woman leaving an abusive relationship), occasionally twisted (The Red Shoes is a fairy tale inspired poem that begins with a meeting in a shoe shop) and often poignant (No Second Chance recounts an autobiographical moment where poor use of an axe to chop wood has unforeseen consequences). The final poem, Graphene, is a love poem as well as a celebration of carbon atoms.
Sue Finch’s poems are flesh on the skeletons of folktales. They are inhabited by creatures who breathe quietly in the human dusk. They are tender, straight-talking, yet can catch you off-guard with their slanted pathways.
Helen Ivory
Sue Finch is a writer of great versatility. Her wide repertoire includes poems that startle and shock with their strong themes (suicide, heartache, trauma within the family), and also quirkier, observational poems, poems which celebrate a star gazing brother, or try to bring the moon down from the sky for a lover.
What all her poems have in common however, is a charge and electric current, language that (in the words of Dylan Thomas) lifts off the page, vivid and immersive imagery and a rich musicality and a fresh new reading of fairytale and ancient tales.
To read Sue is to be transported to other worlds, not just the gorgeous yet unsettling lands of the Hare Mother, the Red Shoes or a traumatised Rapunzel, but to worlds in which the everyday is transformed into the stuff of myth and legend.A glorious and transcendent read from a poet with a fiercely original vision of the world, and a strongly developed imagination.Anna Saunders, Cheltenham Poetry Festival Founding Director.
‘Sue Finch’s poems have the ability both to beguile and shock you with their humour, tenderness and darkness. Her confident dexterity with language and voice scoops the reader up and deposits them firmly in the world of her poems, whether that be family history, domesticity or an old fairy tale seen through new eyes. Sue’s writing is vivid; it’s curious. Her poems question and challenge the reader to be curious too; it’s a challenge well worth accepting.’
Georgi Gill, Editor, The Interpreter’s House.
