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About the author
SUE LOCKWOOD’s poems have appeared in Island, Meanjin, Heat, Antipodes and other journals and anthologies. In 2006 she received an Australia Council grant as an emerging writer. She has won or been commended in many prizes, including the Bridport, Fish, ACU, Gwen Harwood, and Liquid Amber Prizes. Sue taught creative writing for many years and belonged to the writers’ group, Io. Poets who influenced her earlier include Theodore Roethke and Charles Wright, and later Robert Hass, Marie Howe, Jorie Graham, and Ada Limon. Among Australian poets whose work touched her are Robert Adamson, Judith Beveridge, Jordie Albiston, and Mark Tredinnick. Sue lives with her husband, a philosopher, in a green wedge of Melbourne on land of the Wurundjeri willam people of the Kulin nation. She can often be found in her garden having a cup of tea and reading, noticing the work the garden needs, and sometimes writing. Her three daughters and granddaughter live close by, one of them in the house Sue’s parents built and where Sue grew up. You can read about much of this in these poems.
About the book
THE FLOWERING DARK practises a gardener’s care on language, on memory, family, place, on art, and being in the world. The great joy of these thoughtful, tender poems is the scent of earth on them, the carolling of birds, the fall of rain, the play of light, the sound of the river, the slosh of the bucket, the texture of seaweed, the impasto of paint on a canvas. Here is a poet of philosophical refinement and linguistic delicacy, who is happy to get her hands dirty. The book begins with what might be a mythic memory of childhood and continues through the landscape of a long life, as much of it spent inside the mind as outside the house.
These lyric poems calibrate the seasons of a speaker’s inner life—her sorrow and gladness—with the concrete mysteries of the outer world. “Outside,” she writes, “there’s so much on offer. Lean in/ and listen to correas filled with the song/ of honeyeaters…”.
Wry, ironic, delighted and devoted, these poems walk in light and anguish and never stop recalling that there is no darkness one can encounter that does not know how to flower.
These poems reflect on moods and dispositions that enrich and often unsettle our lives. They are compelling and wise, and they argue that poetry must be a matter of passion and deep engagement with craft. The poems have been tended to lovingly, meticulously and the result is a masterful collection that sings line by line.
Judith Beveridge
What a gem of a collection: I've read it over and over and fallen in love with more poems each pass. The Flowering Dark achieves that most necessary of outcomes in a frenetic world; it slows the reader down and makes a compelling case for paying close attention to the quotidian. In this wise, gentle debut, Lockwood refuses the easy binaries of life and death, animate and inanimate, or garden and gardener. These are meticulously-crafted poems that reward uninterrupted reading and re-reading
Audrey Molloy