Susan Wicks’ poetry transforms the apparently ordinary into something precise, surprising and revelatory. The new poems of Night Toad move outwards from the intimacy of personal loss to a wider landscape haunted by disappearance – a French Flanders still scarred by successive wars, the woman penfriend of a prisoner on Death Row, an old woman with dementia lost in the woods, the absent keeper of an unmanned Cornish lighthouse. As well as a whole new collection, the volume also includes a generous selection of work from Susan Wicks’ three previous books of poems, Singing Underwater (1992), Open Diagnosis (1994) and The Clever Daughter (1996). Since the publication of Night Toad in 2003, Susan Wicks has published four subsequent collections, De-iced (2007), House of Tongues (2011), The Months (2016) and Dear Crane (2021).