Poetry

Sue has published five volumes of poetry. Her awards include the 2015 Caselberg International Poetry Prize, the 2013 Cancer Council Victoria Poetry Prize, the 2007 Inverawe Poetry Prize (Tasmania, Australia) and second place in the 2013 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (UK). She won the 2011 NZ Poetry Society International Competition,  the 2006 Aoraki Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and has twice won the Takahe International Poetry Competition. She was runner up in the 2015 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize (Australia) and has twice been longlisted for the Canberra Vice-Chancellors Poetry Prize. Sue wrote 4 poems for “Lan Yuan – A Garden of Distant Longing” a book about Dunedin’s Chinese Garden (2013).

The Yield

The Yield is one of the most satisfying, intelligent, well-crafted and involving volumes of New Zealand poetry I have read in the last decade.”

Reid’s Reader (27 March 2017)

To me, the challenge and deep delight of poetry has always been in how much you can say with how little. I like denseness. I want one crucial word that does the work of ten. Wootton has shown herself to be a master in this regard. There is not a single word in this book that does not need to be there.”

Sarah Lin Wilson, The Reader (27 March 2018)

The Yield was shortlisted for the 2018 NZ Book Awards.

The Yield is the vivid and lyrical new collection from award-winning poet Sue Wootton.

These poems are sensorially alive, deeply attentive to language, the body, and the world around us.

bone-knowledge beating a path through the body to the throat
labouring to enter the alphabet.

– ‘Lingua Incognita’

Wootton addresses subjects as various as the fraught relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering, the disintegration of the polar icecaps, the energising power of solitude and the rewarding demands of creativity and love.

This is a collection about give and take, loss and gain; about sowing, tending and reaping.

Sue Wootton brings her characteristic linguistic dexterity, exuberance and versatility to every page. The Yield is rich harvest.

Hear Sue read Sea foam at Gemstone Beach from The Yield. Hear Sue talk with Vanda Symon – Write On (8 March 2017) about The Yield and writing poetry here.

Read some of Sue’s work here:

• Shenandoah – ‘Graveyard Poem'
• Tuesday Poem – ‘Tryst’
• Blackmail Press 24 – ‘Solstice, Port Chalmers’, ‘Kiss’ & ‘Variations on a theme by Kenneth Koch’
• Blackmail Press 30 – ‘Lovebird’, ‘Hatebird’ & ‘Term Break’
• Turbine 04 – ‘Spring song’
• Turbine 07 – ‘Bog Confessions’
• Turbine 08 – ‘Out of the Wind’
• Turbine 15 – ‘A behoovement’ 
• Deep South 2008 – ‘Dart’, ‘Ginkgo’ & ‘Ideas above my station’
• Best New Zealand Poems 2004 – ‘Countdown’

Email: sue(AT)suewootton.com

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