“By the time you start to compose, more than half the work has already been done.
The crucial part of the business is what happens before you face the empty page.”
– Seamus Heaney
My first collection, Open After Dark, was published in 2017 (Oversteps) explores the beauty and mystery of the natural world, and the complexity of our relationship with it, and with each other. For more details, and to purchase a copy, please contact me or visit www.overstepsbooks.com.
What I love about these poems is how they hold the spiritual and physical in equal measure: some are meditative, others more passion-fuelled, but all are clear-eyed, lyrical and brave…. with a directness of speech and luminosity of observation. Proffitt is not afraid to take us to the darkest places of the human heart and some poems are unsettling in their intimacy and honesty. An extraordinary physicality is expressed – sometimes brutal, often tender and revelatory; but it is the recognition of our spiritual needs and how they might be answered that is the abiding theme…
Greta Stoddart
Sue Proffitt’s poems are not so much observed as lived, inhabited. Whether it’s her vivid creature poems, where the passing of a herd of wild boar is ‘ringing like a storm glass’ or the exquisite personal poems of family and love, you experience what the poet has experienced…. this is an exceptional collection to read and re-read.
Simon Williams
Greta Stoddart
Sue Proffitt’s poems are not so much observed as lived, inhabited. Whether it’s her vivid creature poems, where the passing of a herd of wild boar is ‘ringing like a storm glass’ or the exquisite personal poems of family and love, you experience what the poet has experienced…. this is an exceptional collection to read and re-read.
Simon Williams
In 2018 I was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and so was lucky enough, in February of that year, to spend a month in a castle in Edinburgh, where I wrote what was to become my second collection, The Lock-Picker (Palewell Press, 2021). The Lock-Picker is an exploration of dementia; for ten years I was intimately involved in supporting my mother through her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s until her death in 2016. It was a harrowing time in many ways, but taught me so much about what it means to live only in the present moment, and what is left when personality, memory and identity have all gone.
There is a great physicality in these poems that seems to run alongside or lead to the spiritual: an interweaving of physical and metaphysical, presence and absence, hope to despair, then back again. Proffitt experiments with form in often surprising ways that present the disorientation of the mind battling to express itself in the breakdown of self. A lyrical, tender collection that manages to counterbalance all the strange and difficult truths of witnessing dementia with a certain tough acceptance.
Greta Stoddart
The journey from first diagnosis to its inevitable end is shown with shattering intimacy … as if we are beamed into the scene itself … There are few collections that cover this ground, and in such a way that the reader and perhaps other carers, might feel changed as a result, wiser, kinder, and as Proffitt hopes in her preface, ‘a little less alone’.
Jane Spiro
I am currently working on my third collection.