Susan Atkinson
Alt text: Atkinson is posing with long, dark hair, smiling at the camera against a rustic brick background. She wears a cozy white beanie and white blazer.
Biography
Susan J. Atkinson is an award-winning teacher and poet. She was born and raised in Northern Staffordshire, England and now makes her home in Ottawa. After fifteen years of being an elementary school teacher, her life has come full circle and she has returned, part-time, to the film industry, often working alongside her filmmaker husband. Recently she was named Honourable Mention in The New Quarterly’s 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and was Longlisted for Exile Edition’s 2023 Ruth and David Lampe Poetry Award. Her long-listed suite, Alice, Circa 1985, will be published as a chapbook in 2025 by Anstruther Press. Her work has appeared in journals, anthologies and online. Atkinson’s debut collection, The Marta Poems was published by Silver Bow Publishing in 2020. Her second collection, all things small, also from Silver Bow, was released in April 2024. Atkinson also writes stories and poetry for children and is the author of four picture books published by Little Witch Press. To find out more visit www.susanjatkinson.com
Poetics Statement
“With writing, for me, the fascination, is how at its core, a poem is a poem, yet at the same time can draw so cleverly to encompass other writing forms and genres.
When my debut poetry collection, The Marta Poems, was published, The New Quarterly Lead Poetry Editor, John Vardon wrote a review, which touched on something, in my poetry, which I hadn’t necessarily noticed or thought of before, but certainly think of quite frequently now.
Vardon suggested that my work, as a whole, often holds an element and an echo of the cinema.
The use of concrete details within a poem can be translated into elements of the screen, setting, character and a voice that seems to lend itself toward the narrative, a moment within a scene. I often choose to write the moment or memory as a poem, because poetry is my heart song, but on reflection I have a feeling my poems could be scripted and filmed /shot as a small scene.
Connecting my background in film to my poetry has perhaps shaped my recent work in a more methodical way. I suspect that both photography and film have inadvertently spilled into my poetry. I wonder if it’s because my first inclination is to play everything through my mind like a film reel.
The best way for me to feel a poem is to see it. Putting myself into the moment and being able to act or walk through the scene helps to round out and add the much-needed layers and depth, whether they be descriptive and concrete or more abstract and emotion-based.
And so, where do the seeds or beginnings of my poems come from? Nine times out of ten, it’s visual—I see the moment, the scene, and then build around it but always from the heart.”
Sample of Poet's Work
half moon full
There is no cure, but we can trick ourselves on a warm
mid-April Saturday afternoon that the doorbell’s ring
will bring a tall man in a black overcoat carrying a bag
of miracles ready for sale, or if not a tall man
we can believe it is a beautiful woman, in a long cape
with a pretty hood, selling combs to dress your
thinning hair and a basket of scarlet apples, one bite
to put you into a deep sleep, free from pain.
But it’s not a tall man in a black overcoat or
a beautiful woman in a long cape, it’s the young
children next door looking for permission to rescue
their ball, which has bounced onto your front lawn.
We sit in the living room surrounded by pockets of
quiet as you rest on your right side, shoulder pressing
into thin cotton sheets, white daisies squashed
beneath your weight, dust pinned in sunlight.
Bent bones of dying orchids hang from all the windows;
tired and grey, they thirst for a simple drop of water.
You are too sick to care for them now, but it is still
your house and we do not wish to overstep.
You spend your days counting full moons, always looking
forward, a silent wish for more time, another birthday,
another trip to the cottage. One more morning to watch
hummingbirds drink from the feeder you’d built years earlier.
We promise in a month we’ll be there, sweeping floorboards,
freeing them of dead ladybirds and mice droppings,
but for now we must leave to make the long drive home,
and by night we find ourselves pulled by a low crescent.
When we stop for a break our daughter collects pinecones
from the roadside — childhood treasures to ease her fears
and in the silence, we tuck grief into small dark spaces
along with hope that you will see this new moon ripen.
From all things small, this poem won The Carleton University Literary Contest in 2016
In This We Find Ourselves
As summer turns her back, buttoning
her coat to meet fall,
we escape to our cottage in the woods
at the top of a lane.
A recent illness has slowed your pace,
shrunk your bones
so your shadow now dawdles, falling
a step or two behind.
While you convalesce, gathered in blankets
that hem you to the porch,
I spend long hours wandering the woods, breathing the trees.
No longer a lost babe, I have learned these woods
and the years that grow around us.
My hair piled into a messy bun
invites feathers and grasses to poke through
the stray white strands — a nest fit for starlings to rest in.
I collect twigs and pebbles, frayed birch bark
pale as oysters,
small treasures to set around our table. I fashion teacups
from acorn caps,
crochet bowls from half-bloomed clusters
of Queen Anne’s lace,
imagine them
filled with fresh-picked blueberries
and clouds of cream.
These are some of the things that will keep you well.
The way the light warms your shoulder,
how patience and tenderness handclasp
around whom we have become.
The trees that hid our lovemaking
when our children were young
shake rain-bruised leaves,
catch the wind in song,
a thousand tinkling tambourines.
At dusk we make friends with a wild rabbit,
eat gingerbread dipped in milky tea
and when we tuck ourselves in for the night,
the moon slips
through a slit in the curtain,
silvering a trail of scattered breadcrumbs
leading to our door.
From all things small, this poem was originally published in The New Quarterly, Winter 2024, Issue #169
The Colour of Home
New home, in a new country,
Marta’s books and sewing patterns furnish bare rooms.
The house is small and attached on one side,
but theirs none-the-less, and Marta is hopeful
in her new home, in her new country their family will grow.
The street is quiet, young trees line its sides,
ash and linden with small leaves that offer music
in the gentle mornings as a cardinal hops from twig
to grape vine, red darting between leaves.
Marta spends these early hours in the garden,
allysum hems the front and small yellow flowers
polka dot the lawn reminding her of the golden glow
of childhood buttercups under her chin.
Now in her own home she will have everything. She will bake decadent desserts with creamy butter and dark brown sugar.
She will sew lace curtains with delicate scalloped edges
to blow breezily at the small front window,
and in the back where the southern exposure catches
afternoon sun, she will grow vegetables and fruit.
Perhaps by the fence a strawberry patch, from which
she will pick only the ripest red to make jams and pies.
There will be cucumbers to pickle and put up in the cold
cellar beside the beets that stain the kitchen counter
as she cuts into deep purple flesh reminding her when
home was narrow fields and meadows coloured with warm ocher
wheat and rye and the fresh green of potato plants, all abandoned
in the home she had fled years and years before.
From The Marta Poems
