Long time member of OU Poets, Sue Spiers, has made the prestigious Dreich Classics Chapbook Competition 2023 shortlist with her submission More Than a Late-Night Drink’.

Sue writing about her successful submissions says: ‘I am what some may call a formalist. Often my poems involve research around a subject and research into forms: how they’re structured, what is their intended use, how lines link to lines, stanzas, rhythm and rhyme or lack thereof. There are very few autobiographical poems in what I put out for public consumption, and, if an event is put into a poem, the words or form may take the poem in a more aesthetic direction – it is neither documentary nor reportage. All my poems are likely to have an opinion expressed with which the reader may disagree. For me it’s finding a way to convey what I think about the world and its inhabitants: human, non-human and inhuman.

The opening poem in More Than a Late-Night Drink, 39 is built on a news story about people smugglers who over-packed a refrigerated lorry and the people suffocated and froze. 39 people died and the poem is 39 lines long. How to Find The One was written after a workshop on LGBQ+ approaches to poetry, and takes a non-binary approach to looking for love, set on an old ship and using a created form I call a ‘grower’, 1 line stanza, 2 lines stanza, 3 lines stanza and so on as the subject or theme expands, and as the poet digs deeper into the subject. Line 1 might be the title, or a quote from another poem as a springboard into the development of the poem. The final poem When we became a nation of coffee drinkers is a light-hearted look at the influence of television advertising on the way people change drinking habits, as an example. It’s dedicated to Anthony Head (Tony) and Sharon Maughan who played the Nescafe couple who seemed to convey that sharing a cup of coffee might lead to More Than a Late-Night Drink, the title of the chapbook.’

Congratulations, Sue!