The Yield
The Yield is the vivid and lyrical new collection from award-winning poet Sue Wootton. These poems are sensorially alive, deeply attentive to language, the body, and the world around us.
Down in the bone the word-strands glimmer and ascend
often disordered, often in dreams,
bone-knowledge beating a path through the body to the throat
labouring to enter the alphabet.
—‘Lingua Incognita’
Wootton addresses subjects as various as the fraught relationship between medical institutions and individual suffering, the disintegration of the polar icecaps, the energising power of solitude and the rewarding demands of creativity and love.
This is a collection about give and take, loss and gain; about sowing, tending and reaping.
Sue Wootton brings her characteristic linguistic dexterity, exuberance and versatility to every page. The Yield is rich harvest.
‘Sue Wootton reaches in, plucks the word you wish for … and holds it out in invitation – here, feel this with your whole body.’
Nicola Easthope, A Fine Line, 2022‘The Yield is one of the most satisfying, intelligent, well-crafted and involving volumes of New Zealand poetry I have read in the last decade. This is a poet who really knows her craft, has a wonderful sense of form, and isn't afraid to front up to big questions without getting sententious about it.’
Nicholas Reid, Reid's Reader‘Dunedin poet Sue Wootton’s fifth collection is a richly mulled book about suffering and empowerment.’
Siobhan Harvey, New Zealand Herald Weekend magazine‘Intelligent, well crafted and involving poems on nature, time and a nagging spiritual sense.’
New Zealand Listener top books of 2017Dunedin poet Sue Wootton’s fifth volume, The Yield is a beautiful, wonderfully produced book. Significantly, it contains a heap of award-winning poems (‘Calling’, ‘Ice Diver’ and ‘Luthier’), yet for a book crammed full of dazzling ideas, a touch of madness and the odd slice of cheese, it retains a sense of space.’
Hamesh Wyatt, Otago Daily Times, 27 March 2017‘Sue Wootton’s latest collection of poetry is a sumptuous read, a read that sparks in new directions while clearly in debt to everything she has written to date.’
Paula Green, NZ Poetry Shelf‘To me, the challenge and deep delight of poetry has always been in how much you can say with how little. I like denseness. I want one crucial word that does the work of ten. Wootton has shown herself to be a master in this regard. There is not a single word in this book that does not need to be there.’
Sarah Lin Wilson, The Reader
Sue Wootton
Sue Wootton has published five volumes of poetry and has received several awards, including the 2015 Caselburg Trust International Poetry Prize and second place in the 2013 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. She won the 2011 NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition and has twice won the Takahē Poetry Competition.
Sue was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2008 and was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship 2020.
Her first novel, Strip (Makaro Press, 2016), was longlisted for the fiction prize in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards. Sue is the Publisher at Otago University Press,...
More About Sue Wootton