What is it to inhabit the earth, to imagine whats beyond
it, to grasp the livingness of things, the brightness of the moment? Sue
Leighs poems are made of particularities. A woman weaves a basket, a painter
catches the brief flight of a bird, a sculptor works with limestone once under
the sea. In our looking, in our making, we may find and lose ourselves. There are objects from the past: a Romano-British stone
votive relief, a medieval roodscreen, a sampler stitched by a child in the nineteenth
century. And what are they to us here, now? The poet suggests that time is
neither here nor there. In poems about travel over land and sea and to the moon, she
depicts our restless, necessary, spirited journeys into being and ways of
being. She comes home always to the shelter and the nourishment of orchards of
her own.

Sue Leighs poems have the art of simplicity. She catches
that strange thing the clarity of the unsaid. Her writing has the depth of
unearthing, ripening, slipping into the last of the light. Pauline Stainer From a review of Chosen Hill: Many of these poems read as meditations on how to exist in the world, and how we might accept the chance happenings of lifeThe Times Literary Supplement