You’ve turned up to play the lead role in your life but have forgotten one crucial thing. You don’t know the script – and so must improvise.
Suzanne Batty’s third collection conjures a world which is part dream, part performance, part excavation. Conversations with the self, with ghosts and with the non-human world are held as if at the edge of waking or in the wings of an improvised play. Urgent, often mysterious wisdom is offered to both poet and reader. In these strange encounters what’s at stake is connection, love and survival – not only concerning human beings, but everything that exists.
In an unsettling collision of meticulously drawn detail and shifting landscapes the poems travel to the metal chain fence at death’s edge, questioning what may lie on the other side. Ultimately they turn back to the drama, pain and joy of life.
Playful, funny, dark and startling, enter this collection stage left or stage right. With the unconscious untethered, nothing is off the table. There is only one rule in this book: DO NOT FEED THE GHOSTS!
'Here is a mature poet exercising her craft with an unstoppable emotional and physical intensity. Channelling influences from the poet John Clare to the actor Andrew Scott, Batty succeeds in remaining uniquely, riotously herself at all times. Strap in for these dreamlike, thrilling and often funny visions of collisions and communions connecting the human and natural worlds. An irresistible read.' – Jacqueline Saphra
Praise for Suzanne Batty's poetry:
‘Suzanne Batty’s States of Happiness is an extraordinary collection that explores mental anguish. It begins with a complex sequence of poems in memory of her twin sister, who died of a rare degenerative disease. Though the book is dark and disturbing, it is also filled with chinks of light. The poems are as compelling as any thriller and full of insight and empathy.’ – Jackie Kay, The Guardian (Books of the Year 2018)
‘At its best, Suzanne Batty’s second full collection approaches the visionary... If the poet harrows, she has served her purpose.’ – Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times
'Reading these tour-de-force poems is to encounter shadow-wonders and brilliant terrors, often drawn from the molten core of childhood, its fury and rue. Here is extraordinary witness in poems that recall the work of Janet Frame in their confronting both of mental anguish and the transformations that are the hard won and healing reward for the descent into such perilous depths. States of Happiness is distinguished by its implacable grace. It invites us ‘"to lie down in Samuel Beckett’s boat, your arms full of lilies".’ – Penelope Shuttle
Ireland: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin
USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org
