Collected Poems, 1965-2018

‘He has a Larkinesque talent for hitting the private, reflective contact with his environment with grace and exactitude.’ –  Jonathan Raban, London Magazine

‘It is good to come upon a poet, David Sutton, who can write with great skill of personal relationships and evanescent moments of insight which are contained by their form.’ – Elizabeth Jennings, The Catholic Herald

Spanning a writing career of over half a century, David Sutton has written poems which sing with the traditional values – clarity, lyric precision, an ear attentive to the nuances of form – allied to a sensibility desiring to communicate experience fully and intimately with the reader.

Yet beneath the unfussiness, the refusual to be drawn into the wildernesses of pretension and obscurity, there lies a passionately engaged observer of the quotidian. These poems – eschewing the fickleness of poetic fashion – were written to last. Be the lyrics about love, loss or mortality, the joys and failings of personal relationships, the wonder of landscape and nature, Sutton’s poems are unified by the simple purpose of seeing it straight and saying it true.