A Quickening Star

The poems in A Quickening Star are brought into increasingly vivid focus line-by-line, each line like a frame in a well-crafted film opening sequence. This loaded narrative quality of Sue Morgan’s work is particularly evident in the short but harrowing ‘Forced Entry’, which begins with “The click-tick/ of a cockroach on a dark ceiling” and escalates by the tenth line to “he knows/ a hundred ways to harm without marking”. Whether tackling abuse, mental health or romance, Sue Morgan’s poems transport you to a space where curtains are parting and a quiet music is creeping in. Born in Lancashire in 1958, Sue Morgan spent much of her childhood in South Africa, working abroad for many years as a teacher, before marrying and moving to Northern Ireland where she still lives. She counts as her mentors Ciaran Carson, Sinead Morrissey and Leontia Flynn who have all been influential in her development as a poet. Her submission Let Red Hibiscus Fall won the Venture Pamphlet Award in 2013 and she was runner up in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing in 2015