Half the Human Race: New and Selected Poems. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Half the Human Race: New and Selected Poems

Half the Human Race includes poems from three previous collections, alongside new work reflecting and developing earlier themes of the lives of women, particularly those who are too often overlooked, unseen, hidden, or silenced – women made to feel “sometimes we take up too much room”.

There’s a Miracle, a Charm, a mythological Sea Orphan; but these poems are tangibly real, about real women’s lives. And as always, Susan Utting’s poems are proud lovers of sound, rhythm, of the cacophony of living. As Philip Gross wrote, reviewing her work, ‘Utting unashamedly loves language, and language seems to love her back.’

‘The new work in Susan Utting’s Half the Human Race explores the social and biological struggles of womanhood, yet for all the hardship, the poems return again and again to the thrills of being alive. Throughout the collection, Utting’s compelling rhythms and linguistic precision vivify the poems, bringing together the pleasures of living with the pleasures of reading.’ Carrie Etter

‘Utting animates life’s brittle edges and her poems carry unforced emotional weight.’ Moniza Alvi

‘Beyond the attractions of their sensuous diction her finest poems accomplish a strikingly steady focus, both compassionate and uncompromising.’ Elizabeth Garrett

SUSAN UTTING was born in South London, moved twenty times in forty years, then settled, after a fashion, in Berkshire. Notions of home, identity and where she comes from frequently feature in her writing, and are again explored in this book, as are the shifting lives of other women, the Half the Human Race of the title.
Susan studied Creative Writing at Sussex University and English with film and drama at Reading University, where she subsequently taught for more than 17 years. Her awards include an Arts Council Laureateship, Poetry Business Pamphlet Prize, The Berkshire Poetry Prize, The Peterloo Prize and a writing fellowship at Reading’s School of English and American Literature. Her poems have been widely published, including in The Times, TLS, The Independent, Forward Book of Poetry, The Poetry Review and Poems on the Underground. Her work was selected by the London Poetry Library to be recorded for Poetry International at the South Bank Centre, where it was broadcast along with other international poets' work.
Half the Human Race follows and includes selections from three earlier collections: Striptease (Smith/Doorstop), Houses Without Walls (Two Rivers Press) and Fair’s Fair (also TRP).