De-iced

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2006. This work features poems that explore the cracks in our experience - between movement and stasis, the everyday reality that surrounds us and what we perceive of it, between what our bodies experience and what can or can't be captured in paint or ink.

Susan Wicks' poetry transforms the apparently ordinary into something precise, surprising and revelatory. These new poems are a departure for her, exploring the cracks in our experience - between movement and stasis, the everyday reality that surrounds us and what we perceive of it, between what our bodies experience and what can or can't be captured in paint or ink. Many of the poems are about escaping - in a car loaded with stolen meat or in the de-iced plane of the title - an escape that takes us first to the snow-bound world of the central MacDowell Winter sequence, and then, in her seriously playful Graham Mickleworth poems, in search of the now-you-see-them-now-you-don't family of a fictional painter. For running away is also running towards, even a kind of pilgrimage, to a place where art and experience, past and future, merge and find ways to survive.