House of Tongues

"House of Tongues" is concerned with acceptance and refusal, power and the lack of it, silence and the refusal of silence. It's also a book full of the sadness and exhilaration of leaving - of saying an often ambivalent goodbye to people and places, a job, friends lost through illness, sex, innocence - and of the precarious process of patiently setting out again. Far from remembered in tranquillity, the emotion here is re-enacted in the book's surprising coda - a series of poems set in the Swedish Hanseatic harbour town of Visby and based on its many colourful stories, from medieval to more modern times. In these poems, tongues mix and entwine in the mouths of unlikely personae in an atmosphere of vengeance and betrayal that throw a retrospective light on the more contemporary themes and material that form the body of Susan Wicks's collection. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

"A poet of deceptive power, who can transmute everyday objects and events into poems with an understated numinous edge" - Kathleen Jamie, PBS Bulletin. "A fine poet, with an eye for detail and a gift for conveying the earthiness of everyday experience" - Jo Shapcott, Independent on Sunday.

Susan Wicks has published eight collections of poetry, five of them with Bloodaxe Books: Dear Crane (2021), The Months (2016), House of Tongues (2011), De-iced (2007) and Night Toad: New & Selected Poems (2003), which includes a selection from three earlier books published by Faber: Singing Underwater, winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize; Open Diagnosis, which was one of the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets titles; and The Clever Daughter, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. House of Tongues, Night Toad, Singing Underwater and The Months are all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She has also published three novels, The Key (Faber, 1997), Little Thing (Faber, 1998) and A Place to Stop (Salt, 2012), a short memoir, Driving My Father (Faber, 1995), and a collection of short fiction, Roll Up for the Arabian Derby (Bluechrome, 2008). Her two book-length translations of the French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Cold Spring in Winter (Arc, 2009) and Talking Vrouz (Arc, 2013) have between them won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation, and been shortlisted for the the International Griffin Prize for Poetry. Born and raised in Kent, she lives in Tunbridge Wells, and is a freelance writer and translator.