Fair’s Fair  by Susan Utting

Two Rivers Press, £7.95

Review Extract

Susan Utting is never intimidating. Her poems welcome you in and they are invariably well made. They sound good too: it’s a pleasure to encounter a collection that flows with such aural felicity. I loved some of the texts here: none of them occupies more than one side, so you can read, re-read and wallow…. ‘Lament for Susie Green’ is a giddy and delicious elegy. Several poems here, in fact, are elegiac, but they explore their losses in different ways. Susie Green’ is merry-sad. ‘Stickler’ is an affectionate, feisty conversation with a person who is not, I think, there. ‘Now’ is brief and clean and perfect….

All in all, this is an engagingly modest book – only 44 page-length poems – and all of them penned by a poet of distinction

Helena Nelson

Ambit Magazine No.209, August 2012 pp 61-2