Following her poetry collection of home thoughts from abroad, The Last Woman Born on the Island, Vagabond Voices is very pleased to publish this prolific poet’s latest collection, Things That Fruit in Darkness. As the title suggests, Sharon Black examines here the challenges we encounter in life and our resilience to them, demonstrating the breadth of her subject matter from one body of work to another.

These poems uncover the hidden worlds of nature and of the human heart. Black explores how these two realms reflect each other and what we can learn from this. Poems about the environment portray sheep, rain, types of soil, marine snow, mountains and a Hebridean apple tree that has been growing alone on a cliff face since the Ice Age – all held together by poems about lichen, which is not actually an organism but a relationship within a hybrid colony of bacteria, algae and fungi. The symbiosis of the lichen relationship runs quietly throughout the book: the ways in which we relate to each other, to ourselves and to our bodies: fragile and yet defiantly resistant.

“With an assured handling of the poetic line, and a unique approach to imagery, Sharon Black’s work interrogates the link between our emotional and physical landscapes. At the heart of this work is the conviction that humans are part of the natural world, and that poetry can bring into focus our deep connection to it.” – Kim Moore

“I hold my pen like a twig of dynamite’ – with fierce tenderness, Sharon Black examines the difficult forces driving life and its many forms of separation. From teenage girls as paper lanterns to lichen inscribing headstones, from dormice hibernating in hedgerows to the unravelling of a marriage, Black quietly attunes to small destructions and creations around us, giving voice to a quotidian frequency of grief and intimacy.” – Kit Fan

Excerpts from The Last Woman Born on the Island