“Kindon’s is a vivid and satisfying poetry of place, invoked, time and again, by the finely wrought details snared by a quick eyed love for the landscapes she so fulsomely inhabits. From Westmorland to the Languedoc, her finely attuned sense of moment, place and story never wavers through twenty-three poems of impressive clarity and inventiveness.” – Martin Malone

“The gap between this world and another unseen world is porous and shifting in these poems and nothing is quite what it seems. Imbued with magic and mystery, landscape takes on a character of its own as the relationship between the self and the world around us comes under scrutiny. This collection is sure-footed and wide ranging, taking in the forests of Brittany and the stone circles of Cumbria, but always circling back to the connection between home and belonging, and how we measure time and its passing.” – Kim Moore

~

Land Slip

When you live by a pond in the wood
you expect the odd
fallen fairytale across the track,

uprooted markers of acacia,
branches of oak
web-foot in the ditch,

an evenness of snow
hugging the house, strong hold
in the hundred year long sleeping hour,

then the drip of slithery thaw,
a green parting,
the briar growing back –

all this you come to expect
when you live by a pond in a wood –
but once in a deluge

some nameless giant of doom
takes a bite from the unmade crust
of the story line and washes it down.

That’s your exit gone:
the familiar plod of the road
slides downhill with the plot,

spittooned to its rightful place,
earth rattle, a trickle of saliva.
To be thus marooned

is a mixed curse: this year
I’ve heard the garden frogs
for the princes they are.

~

Sue Kindon stopped writing poetry after a surfeit of literature at Hull University. She rediscovered her creativity many years later when she joined a newly formed poetry group in the Cumbrian village where she was then living. She thought it was to read poetry; what she didn’t know was that group members were also expected to write it. Since then she has never looked back and she now lives and writes in the French Pyrenees.

~

She who pays the piper is currently available from Lulu. Available soon from Amazon, and direct from the press.