These poems are full of desires and ambitions – some fulfilled, some thwarted, from learning to read to reaching the moon, from shape-shifting to living without mirrors. The graveyard dead join in the partying at the village pub, and a taxidermist’s labours come back to life.
Throughout, poems are paired to speak to or reflect each other in chain-reaction, all enriched by Utting’s rich vocabulary and distinctive patterns of rhythm and sound.
"One of the many rewards of Fair’s Fair lies in the way Susan Utting weaves the details of teeth, needlework and cocktail umbrellas into the pulse of the rumba. These poems shimmy in the mind long after closing the cover."
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
"Elegiac and sensuous, pressing and haunting in their almost hallucinatory narrative detail, the poems in Fair’s Fair reveal Susan Utting’s capacity to move us at its most powerful yet – a new collection of great skill and lucid tenderness."
Jane Draycott
Susan Utting’s second collection, Houses Without Walls (Two Rivers Press, 2006), was featured in the Independent on Sunday, with a poem included in the Best Single Poem category of The Forward Book of Poetry 2007. Her first full collection, Striptease, was published in 2001 by Smith/Doorstop. Susan is the founder of Reading’s Poets’ Café, and has read her poetry at arts festivals including Edinburgh, StAnza, Ledbury and Aldeburgh.