Swimming to Albania / Sue Hubbard

“Reading Sue Hubbard’s Swimming to Albania, the reader enters a world of acute absence and remoteness haunted by the ever-present unresponsive dead, into which the details of everyday reality explode like hand grenades. Whether recalling lost relationships, travelling in foreign cities, observing landscapes and gestures or contemplating works of art, these balanced, skilful, stark, courageous and strangely erotic poems offer the reader the deepest sense of inquest into the self. They are extraordinarily moving.”  

“These poems are haunted by rocks and beaches, the foam of a wave breaking or teenager’s sugar-stiff petticoat, figures dimly recalled from the empty streets of childhood. Against these recurring images, Sue Hubbard traces an all-too-human journey between pain and the vagaries of hope on one hand, adult forgiveness and understanding on the other.  She knows how to “sort vowels and furled consonants”, and how poems are salvific of the promises that the child she was, made to herself.” 

“Swimming to Albania has a perfectly balanced tripartite structure, contrasted, like the Anglo-Saxon elegies, with present or past companionship. Moving between an Atlantic shoreline retreat and familial inland warmth it contains highly evocative elegies for the poet's father and finds, in the final section, recovery through artistic retreat in Siena and Portugal, ending with a further move outward in the title-poem. There are several wonderful figures of displacement: the mermaid out of her element on the earth; the imagined visitor who is a male poem. The book as a whole shows eloquently, in the words of its final section, that 'we travel to discover who we are.”

“There is a frank and baffled rage in these poems, in part against loss, age, loneliness and lack of communication. Yet there is also a passionate desire to recover order and meaning, for the regards of love, for some form of redemption. The woman as island is a recurring trope – literally when the narrator inhabits a wind-swept and remote coastline; metaphorically, she is often a solo visitor to European cities, sometimes almost a stranger in her own family, sometimes to herself. Despite this, in the act of each poem’s creation, Hubbard triumphantly snatches positive value from the very precision and courage with which she renders disillusionment.”

Martyn Crucefix

“Starting with an image of childhood home these poems explore the positioning of the older daughter and the ensuing loneliness and longing which follows into adulthood. Then, with this as the reader's map, we travel outwards into less known geographies to experience how that isolation, that desire to belong, repeats itself in widening circles ...”