Too Young For The Saxophone – forthcoming

Description

Living as we do in the age of doomscrolling, it is a delight to encounter this collection by Susan Utting. She is the ultimate glass-half-full poet. Not that her exquisitely accomplished poems shy away from harsher realities of being human, but these are explored through the microscope of empathetic observation; they celebrate endurance and find beauty therein.

Susan Utting. Paperback, 58 pages, 210 x 135 mm, April 2027.

About the author: Susan Utting was born in South London, moved twenty times in forty years, then settled, after a fashion, in Berkshire. After a patchy education (she failed the Eleven Plus) and a series of undemanding jobs, she was persuaded by an employer to apply to Reading University to read English. She gained a first-class degree and went on to study Creative Writing at Sussex University, which she then taught at Reading and Oxford Universities for more than 17 years. She is the founder of Reading’s long-running acclaimed Poets’ Café, which she hosted for many years. Her awards include an Arts Council Laureateship, A Poetry Business Prize, The Berkshire Poetry Prize, The Peterloo Prize and a writing fellowship at Reading’s School of English and American Literature. She was a winner in the Bristol International Short Story Competition and was selected by the London Poetry Library to be recorded for Poetry International at the South Bank Centre. Most recently, she has had her poem celebrating the needlewomen who copied the Bayeux Tapestry for Reading Museum published by Candlestick Press in their booklet “Ten Poems about Sewing”.

The lingua franca of all the distinctive three parts of this book is simplicity and clarity. But Utting also revels in her choice of words ‘that smile like secrets’ (The Habit of Solitude) and weaves them together in patterns that are visual and compelling. Her close and changing relationships with aspects of her world reappear in different manifestations (the moon, magpies, colour) throughout, while her sense of rhythm reflects the ‘heady joy of hearing’ (Wired for Sound). Read, inhabit, experience. You will feel the better for it. — Joy Howard  (Grey Hen Press)

Dancing in red-shod feet and with her ‘rusty heart’ holding ‘on to the lovely shambles of our lives,’ what matters to Susan Utting in her seventh collection is the luck of the ordinary. Her praise is for unseen workers and city dwellers, nursing mothers and larking boys. There is concern and wit too for our changed world of thirsty homesick rowans and howling gales under the ‘D-list needy’ moon. Her inventive imagery is a joy. Here, in full riff, ‘pride is like a small bird’ where pocketed it is ‘snug as a pit in a plum.’ And love, amongst other surprises, is ‘an out of joint thumb clicking back into place.’ Love pervades as Utting negotiates life in a dress of glad solitude. Brava!  — Kate Noakes