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 ...”

"The Forgetting and Remembering of Air is a stunning piece of work – an achingly moving narrative of love for a child, parent, sibling, lover or icon. In these poems Hubbard is travelling through love and its possibilities of home, moving fast towards the acceptance of the disappointment, the ruin of it, like that great house of the cover."

"There is nothing safely aesthetic about these poems, beautifully observed though they frequently are. The watching intelligence reaches so far into the places, situations or works of art that it nearly forgets itself, and maybe desires to. The central block of poems on the tragic deaths of women signal that danger, and make it all the more of an achievement when the closing poems journey to the edge of the Atlantic, almost beyond comfort or habitable land, and come back with a final, hard-won ‘...yes’."

"‘There are two kinds of islands' begins the poem, ‘Dreaming of Islands’, ‘those born of erasure and fracture'. From the 'river's dark skin' at Bow Creek to Yves Klein, from St Ives to Prussian Blue; from Cliff and Elvis to Charing Cross, from Dora Carrington to Diane Arbus, Sue Hubbard locates places and people with a lyrical precision of voice, following those erasures and fractures to a 'fragile yes'. The poems surge with a natural force breathing the world 'into and out of itself'. A mixture of nature and art; this is an impressive book."

"Whether describing the Thames estuary or the remote west coast of Ireland, Sue Hubbard pays close and exact attention to the elemental world and the vulnerability of the human within it. These moving poems face the ‘anthracite dark’ outside and inside us, and emerge renewed by it, like prayers ‘written on the waves’."