"Reading Sue Hubbard's Swimming to Albania, the reader enters a world of acute absence and remoteness haunted by the ever-present unresponsive dead, into which the details of everyday reality explode like hand grenades. Whether recalling lost relationships, travelling in foreign cities, observing landscapes and gestures or contemplating works of art, these balanced, skilful, stark, courageous and strangely erotic poems offer the reader the deepest sense of inquest into the self. They are extraordinarily moving." - Annie Freud
"These poems are haunted by rocks and beaches, the foam of a wave breaking or teenager's sugar-stiff petticoat, figures dimly recalled from the empty streets of childhood. Against these recurring images, Sue Hubbard traces an all-too-human journey between pain and the vagaries of hope on one hand, adult forgiveness and understanding on the other. She knows how to "sort vowels and furled consonants", and how poems are salvific of the promises that the child she was, made to herself." - Theo Dorgan
"Swimming to Albania has a perfectly balanced tripartite structure, contrasted, like the Anglo-Saxon elegies, with present or past companionship. Moving between an Atlantic shoreline retreat and familial inland warmth it contains highly evocative elegies for the poet's father and finds, in the final section, recovery through artistic retreat in Siena and Portugal, ending with a further move outward in the title-poem. There are several wonderful figures of displacement: the mermaid out of her element on the earth; the imagined visitor who is a male poem. The book as a whole shows eloquently, in the words of its final section, that we travel to discover who we are." - Bernard O'Donoghue
"There is a frank and baffled rage in these poems, in part against loss, age, loneliness and lack of communication. Yet there is also a passionate desire to recover order and meaning, for the regards of love, for some form of redemption. The woman as island is a recurring trope - literally when the narrator inhabits a wind-swept and remote coastline; metaphorically, she is often a solo visitor to European cities, sometimes almost a stranger in her own family, sometimes to herself. Despite this, in the act of each poem's creation, Hubbard triumphantly snatches positive value from the very precision and courage with which she renders disillusionment." - Martyn Crucefix
"Starting with an image of childhood home these poems explore the positioning of the older daughter and the ensuing loneliness and longing which follows into adulthood. Then, with this as the reader's map, we travel outwards into less known geographies to experience how that isolation, that desire to belong, repeats itself in widening circles..." - Linda Rose Parkes
Hubbard, Sue: - Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. Twice winner of the London Writers Competition and winner of third prize in the National Poetry Competition, her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), The Idea of Islands: a collaboration with the artist Donald Teskey (Occasional Press, Ireland). Twenty of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 2000: an Anthology (Carcanet) and, as the Poetry Society's only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London's largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo. Her poems have been read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row and appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer and numerous magazines and anthologies and have been recorded for the Poetry Archive.
Her prose and novels include Rothko's Red: short stories (Salt), Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press). Her third novel, Rainsongs, is published by Duckworth, UK, Overlook Press, US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China.
As an art critic she has written regularly for The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, Time Out, The New Statesman and many leading art magazines. Her selected art writings Adventures in Art is published by Other Criteria.
She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and twice been a Hawthornden Fellow. In 1999 she was awarded a major Arts Council award to finish her second novel.
