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last update:
 
2nd Dec21

Susi Clare photo e-mail Susi
 
Susi Clare at Cyberwit
 
Susi Clare at Impremix

poetry favourites:
 
Poetry on the Lake
 
Orbis

and in the shop…
collections –
“The Man who brought Copper and gold”
Cyberwit.net
 
“Beyond/Oltre”
(Eng/It)
Impremix
 

 

 

Susi Clare was born and educated in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, and went on to study in Birmingham and London. She worked as a tour guide and later as a resident rep in Liguria. She taught EFL in Milan, wrote travel articles for English-language magazines, and was published in The Guardian and The Telegraph. She has worked as a translator for a variety of Italian magazines as well as for contemporary painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, a grappa-producer and a Milanese jewellery-making company, and translates novels and hard-back travel guides for a publishing house in Varese.
 
She has been prized, commended and short-listed in poetry competitions and published in Orbis and anthologies including Poetry on the Lake, I Cento Castelli, Weyfarers, Seafield Publications, Hungry Hill on-line.
 
Her first full collection of poems is The Man who brought Copper and Gold (2021, Cyberwit.net, India), from which a selection of 30 poems are published in English and Italian in Beyond / Oltre (2021, Impremix, Turin). She lives near Lake Maggiore in Lombardy and spends a good deal of time in the UK.
 
Review comments on The Man who brought Copper and Gold:
 

Evocative, insightful, vivid and visceral, linguistically masterful. Susi Clare’s excellent first collection employs diverse voices – family, artisan, animal, terrorist, the inanimate – to address equally diverse topics – love and sex, cruelty, injustice, mercy, discovery, joy. Nothing is beyond her poetic reach.

 

Anne Stewart, poetry p f

 
 

A feisty, rich and energetic first collection of poems that generate heat and sorrow, laughter and tears. Her subjects amongst others: Artist and model, first love, the density of family relationships, dramatic monologue – always expressed with an effervescent engagement with language and its possibilities. A collection that’s enjoyable, moving, witty and fizzing with life.

 

Christopher North

 
 
Review comments on Beyond / Oltre:
 

Familial figures come to life here in poems that employ memory to construct a remembered world. The tone of rueful understanding of the vagaries of childhood and adolescence is perfectly judged, as are the portraits of family members. This poet has an observing eye and a guarded heart. She delineates the present historic moment with its dangers and abysses, a world where to go unarmoured is a bad idea. These poems walk the line between openness and restraint with poise and certitude. There are also some beautiful animal poems, ranging from the splendid energy of ‘Tayarra, the Racing Camel’, and the realised innocence of the creature in ‘The Vixen’. This is a varied, accomplished and adventurous collection.

 

Penelope Shuttle

 
 

First person accounts are not always autobiographical, and Susi Clare insists that these poems are not, in the strict sense; rather, they capture imaginatively an authentic feel of lived experience, presented through a lively sense of imagery, a sharp eye for telling detail and a sensitive ear for formally controlled colloquial language. Above all, they show an all-embracing human sympathy. Why have we not heard more of this poet?

 

Barry Tempest