Vanishing Trick

A restless and apprehensive spirit reaching out towards some kind of reconciliation.
-- New Hope International, June 2004

Her poems tell a story, have an almost filmic quality in their vivid details of place.
--Tamar Yoseloff, Poetry London

Poems of travel, risk, adventure, united by a sensual pleasure that regards fortune and misfortune with the same hungry eye, --The Word Hoard, February 2004

Tiny adjustments, large effects. Sue Butler's is a world of apprehensions, not unlike Chekhov's. Delicacy and desire, wild grass. --George Szirtes

Sue Butler has travelled much in Russia and many of the poems in this book relate to her experiences there. But this book does not fall into the trap of holiday poems , like dull photos or slides: the equivalent of this is me in Red Square .

She has an intimate knowledge of the country, its people and their language. She hones in on details of the people she writes about, so that the reader ends up knowing them as friends, or indeed as enemies.

These are poems of lived experience, focusing on particularities startling, moving, beautiful.