Biography

Suzanne Marie Iuppa is a poet, community worker and filmmaker who lives in North Wales. She grew up on Lake Ontario and spent time in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee before coming to University of Manchester to study modern British poetry in the 1980s. Suzanne also gained a degree in Countryside Management and worked as a ranger in the Clwydian Mountains, where she was based for 25 years. In 2016, she moved home to a small village in southern Snowdonia. She is still involved with rare species conservation in the UK, mainly in Wales. She has raised three sons. Much of her writing is influenced by day-to-day relationships and how these can contrast with ecology and wild settings. Her live performance is known for vivid and surreal imagery-- "brilliantly strange"-- VoiceBox. Her work can be found in magazines such as Litro, The Lampeter Review, Visual Verse, Words for the Wild, Innovations, Ink, Sweat & Tears, and Zoomorphic. Her first poetry series, On Track was published in 2013 (Alyn Books) and Well Spring, inspired by healing wells in Wales and their associated myths, followed in 2015 from The Gwendraeth Press. Suzanne is a regular Festival performer and is now working towards her first full-length collection. To book performance and workshops-- iuppa@hotmail.com To contact The Gwendraeth Press: gwendraethpress@gmail.com Twitter: Suzanne Iuppa@wildernesspoet photograph: Margreeth Durban New Statesman Upstarts Award for Social Entrepreneurs 2001 Shortlisted: Bridport Prize 2016 Commended: 2017 Mother's Milk Books Writing Prize Shortlisted: WoLF Poetry Competition 2019

Samples

World’s End 1. Five hours walk from Nant Mill out of the dense rhododendron guarding the river. The air is thick and grudgingly sucked in. A stillness hangs in it, a white mildness that keeps the campion and the tormentil blooming. The sheep’s fescue and the clover are being quietly cropped on the Dyke in the next field; we sight it and amble over, taking sharp pleasure in flattening any intervening molehills. The beeches barely catch the quick shunt of a wood pigeon, or a collared dove. 2. Offa’s jealous effort is the only landmark sprouting nettles and ragwort at the worn path edges. We travel past Minera and its idle lead mines that once industriously pumped alloys into the Clywedog, stopping each weir with rotted fish. We follow it upstream into the Pleistocene as it’s drawn in the textbooks, onto the moorland, shearing away at the horizon. A giant’s been and left bleachered quarries in his wake patiently waiting to revegetate. The scenery excludes everything; adaptations of species or centuries. 3. Winter here is the unmentionable. The snow scours the building heather and bilberry and rapidly humbles it. Four hundred years ago, it is said, a virgin was conveyed here on the mountain track from Llandegla, tracing the Horseshoe around each inch of escarpment. She arrived from the hall at Bodidris to a wooded chink in the cap of the Eglwyseg. There was no Earl to greet her. She was confined and gave birth into a swaddle of gorse, which was quickly thrown on the fire that gave the room light. The volatile oils snapped and stopped any cries. Or perhaps the bundle was carried up to the ling and bracken. A red grouse had its eyes. A buzzard that had caught only one stringy hare in the last three days turned carrion, and enjoyed a royal bellyful. 4. I find you in a different way: hide and seek past the conifer plantation, up the gully-lined hill, the frozen albumin cracking under my boots, to be greeted by the last mature trees, wrenched headlong and exhausted. My own illegitimate is wedged in the trunk of an oak that has rotted, amber and crumbling. He steps out of its heart-- woodlice milling over him in saprophytic fury. He gently lifts one as it scutters over his eyelid, fearless, my love, my proof.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.