Sample poems:

House of Prayer

Speechless (fist published in Poems in the Waiting Room, 2018)

Matryoshka (2nd prize, The Frogmore Poetry Prize 2013)

Available from Pindrop Press

This lyrical, graceful collection is split into three parts: ‘The Thing You're Looking For’, ‘Spring Fever’ and ‘House of Prayer’. One unifier is nature: Black inhabits it, luxuriates in it, eroticises it, with a trademark spearing of the essential beauty of living things - even flies: 'gemstones sprung / from a snapped necklace'. The second section describes with mesmerising honesty, a love triangle, a relationship and an affair. Black writes with a fine eye for detail which engages her readers in the minutae of life. Her commitment to using poetry as a mediation between her inner self and the natural world around her is immediately apparent and is full of dense, exhuberant colour, rooted in the everyday world. There is a delicacy of intent with the nature writing and the poems take flight gracefully, taut and delicious; 'Buddha's head rests / upon his bent knee.// His expression fills me / almost to bursting.// A cricket unzips itself / over and over'."

Reviews:

Diary of a Soul Writer

The Interpreter's House: "The art is of turning everything into a 'yes' moment. And Black has that art."

Envoi: "full of dense, exhuberant colour, rooted in the everyday world. An exciting read."

The Frogmore Papers: "the poems take flight gracefully, taut and delicious."