Sue Boyle
2009 Competition Winner
Sue Boyle is the organiser of the Bath Poetry Cafe. Her work has been published in The Rialto, Acumen, Magma and The Interpreter's House.
Her poem 'A leisure centre is also a temple of learning' was chosen for the Forward Prize Anthology 2009, and her collection 'Unregarded Lives' was a first-stage winner in the 2009 Book & Pamphlet Competition.
Sue Boyle on her work:
I'm surprised how many of the poems in 'Too Late for the Love Hotel' deal with transience and fragility. Perhaps this comes from my years in the antiques trade where a sense of the vulnerability of rare and precious things is at the heart of everything you do. A similar feeling often seems to inform my writing about other people's lives. I also think my poems have a certain unintended quirkiness which might come from years of immersion in the world of auctions and antiques fairs. I went to a recent sale on an industrial estate in Dorset where the catalogue included an animated waxwork of Queen Victoria, one of Princess Diana's evening gowns, a set of animal castrating tools, a pair of shire horse lawn boots, a french executioner's axe and a badly stuffed unicorn. Anything can turn up in an out of the way auction house or on an early morning market stall. Time collapses on itself. It is impossible, as a dealer, to be taken aback by oddity.
Smith/Doorstop titles
Too Late for the Love Hotel (July, 2010)
Reviews
'The title [Unregarded Lives*] proposes an idea of modesty – which is certainly present in the humble attentiveness these poems pay to their subjects, but is also belied by the range and strangeness of the book’s interests.' — Andrew Motion
*Original title of 'Too Late for the Love Hotel'
Publicity
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