Night Toad

Susan Wicks’ poetry transforms the apparently ordinary into something precise, surprising and revelatory. The new poems of Night Toad move outwards from the intimacy of personal loss to a wider landscape haunted by disappearance – a French Flanders still scarred by successive wars, the woman penfriend of a prisoner on Death Row, an old woman with dementia lost in the woods, the absent keeper of an unmanned Cornish lighthouse. As well as a whole new collection, the volume also includes a generous selection of work from Susan Wicks’ three previous books of poems, Singing Underwater (1992), Open Diagnosis (1994) and The Clever Daughter (1996). Since the publication of Night Toad in 2003, Susan Wicks has published four subsequent collections, De-iced (2007), House of Tongues (2011), The Months (2016) and Dear Crane (2021).

Susan Wicks has published eight collections of poetry, five of them with Bloodaxe Books: Dear Crane (2021), The Months (2016), House of Tongues (2011), De-iced (2007) and Night Toad: New & Selected Poems (2003), which includes a selection from three earlier books published by Faber: Singing Underwater, winner of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize; Open Diagnosis, which was one of the Poetry Society’s New Generation Poets titles; and The Clever Daughter, a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. House of Tongues, Night Toad, Singing Underwater and The Months are all Poetry Book Society Recommendations. She has also published three novels, The Key (Faber, 1997), Little Thing (Faber, 1998) and A Place to Stop (Salt, 2012), a short memoir, Driving My Father (Faber, 1995), and a collection of short fiction, Roll Up for the Arabian Derby (Bluechrome, 2008). Her two book-length translations of the French poet Valérie Rouzeau, Cold Spring in Winter (Arc, 2009) and Talking Vrouz (Arc, 2013) have between them won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation from French and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for Literary Translation, and been shortlisted for the the International Griffin Prize for Poetry. Born and raised in Kent, she lives in Tunbridge Wells, and is a freelance writer and translator.