Ghost Station

by Sue Hubbard

Published 1 January 2004
In this long awaited second collection, Sue Hubbard gathers together five major sequences which combine to form in a journey of love, loss and redemption. The central theme is an extended elegy to the poet's brother. Hubbard guides us into labyrinths of haunting emotion and dares to give utterance to our deepest concerns. Exploring both the dark and the light, she gives voice to raw emotion, to our vulnerabilities, so often concealed, and through its disclosure suggests the possibility of renewal.

In this, her third collection, Sue Hubbard meditates on art and the natural world. By going to the extreme edge of western Ireland, to a Cornish beach, to the rim of the Solway Firth and the mouth of the Thames she explores, in these disarmingly direct and evocative poems, in a language that is muscular and lyrical, painterly yet spare, the illusion of romantic love and the letting go of childhood grief. In the central section, based on paintings by the artist Rachel Howard, she examines the psychology of different women in extremis.