Suzanna Fitzpatrick's The Deeper Read

In the context of a review culture in which hot takes, pseudo blurbs and cod-academic posturing are rife, it's a huge breath of fresh air to encounter a critic who engages with a poet and their poetry, who gets to grips with the nuts and bolts of every line, who reaches far beyond a mere description of thematic concerns, all without lapsing into jargon or self-aggrandisement.

This is why I'm thoroughly recommending Suzanna Fitzpatrick's The Deeper Read today. It's a regular Substack where she delves deeply into one collection at a time. Her writing and insights are terrific in their clarity, worthy of a wider audience and way more interesting than most reviews that can be found in major journals, even the essay-length ones, so I'm not taking restricted words counts as an excuse here. In fact, Fitzpatrick's showing up a fair few bigger names in The Deeper Read. I suggest you explore its archive via this link, but with one warning: it's likely to provoke you into purchases of poetry books that you'd never heard of and suddenly need...!

The stretching of wings, Suzanna Fitzpatrick's Fledglings

Suzanna Fitzpatrick's pamphlet collection, Fledglings (Red Squirrel Press, 2016) is first of all a gorgeous object, with limpid, expert typesetting from Gerry Cambridge and high production values that make it delicious to the touch.

What of the poetry itself? Well, Fitzpatrick mines a rich seam of pregnancy, motherhood and the raising of infants that has also provided an excellent source of material in recent times for the likes of Kate Clanchy and Kate Bingham. However, it would be unfair to pigeonhole her work, as its appeal reaches beyond the immediate subject matter.

It’s often said that elegies allow and even demand the poet to hunt for meaning and grope for words that might reflect an experience out of reach of language. Well, Suzanna Fitzpatrick shows that the process of birth, its build-up and aftermath, ranks alongside. Her images that make us look afresh at the universal events she portrays, as in “Quake”:

“…My pelvis groans

at the speed, an iceberg calving…”

And also in “Blazon”.

“Now

we are separate

I can touch you

trace

the ballbearings

of your joints…”

This same knack for finding a resonant, satisfying yet somehow renewed image runs through the book, but nowhere more so than in its title poem, which begins as follows:

“I stroke the tiny kites

of your shoulder blades,

Imagine wings. Gingerly

I stretch my own.

It’s been so long

since I trusted them...”

This poem shows Fitzpatrick at her best, never seeming to strain or force her way towards something artificial. Instead, her verse is fresh but clear in its thrust, hinting at depths instead of shouting them from the rooftops. For example, the title poem might focus on her specific reaction to a shift in mother/child roles, but her expression of this experience invites her reader to a far wider reflection of the way dynamics change in families as years go by and generations are followed by generations.

Fledglings is a lovely introduction to a poet who’s already in control of her material and is capable of affecting her reader. Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s verse is deceptively broad in scope and I look forward to seeing her stretch her poetic wings in due course in the format of a full collection.