Poetry, fiction and other writing
Poetry Collections
I had always written poems from time to time and had even had a few published, but until 2014, when I took Roselle Angwin's Elements of Poetry course and then joined Jo Bell's wonderful online group 52, I thought of myself primarily as a prose writer. During that year I started 'coming out' as a poet and having more poems published in magazines. In 2017 I published my first collection. I've now published four books of poetry, two full-length collections, A House of Empty Rooms and I never think dark will come, and two short collections, Last of the Line and Tasting the Sweet Cold. You can find sample poems from these collections on the Poems page.
A House of Empty Rooms, my first collection, was published in 2017 by Indigo Dreams Publishing. Most of the poems in it are about people – family members, friends, historical figures – and about loss and unrequited love. Although a thread of sadness runs through the collection, some of the poems, such as Nocab, about my Jewish family eating bacon, and The Graduate, about watching the film of that name with a teenage boyfriend, are lighter in tone.
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Cover design by Ronnie Goodyer
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A House of Empty Rooms is filled with deftly crafted, nuanced poems which explore the meaning of family, of mortality and change with tenderness and integrity. Susan writes 'I didn't say my heart/was a house with all its doors wide open/or that it was you who'd opened them', but that is exactly what these poems achieve. Rebecca Gethin
Susan Jordan's first collection roams over many subjects and the poems are sharply observed, poised, and unfold pleasingly and coherently. Whether she's speaking of breaking breakfast taboos or of lost or unrequited love, the poems crackle with acerbic insight. Roselle Angwin
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I never think dark will come, my second collection, was published early in 2021 by Oversteps Books. It's more varied and wide-ranging than A House of Empty Rooms, with poems about home and garden, nature poems, political poems and poems that touch on the spiritual.
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Cover painting by Anne Pirie
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These are deeply thoughtful, measured and finely written poems. Preoccupied with the meaning of home versus instability they travel “deep into the far reaches of the unknown self”. They explore the traumas of the Jewish experience in poems such as Kristallnacht, and the horrifying Industrial Process where “the technology is simple/ a few pipes, a stopcock/ a door with a good seal”, but in counterbalance the poet offers Homeland where the plight of the Palestinians is compassionately portrayed. There is gentle self-mockery in the poems Poet and Divorce, also celebration in both Laudemus and Benediction, where four rosehips dangle “deep red, each one a sacrament”. But behind many of the poems there is an angst, an insecurity like that of Virginia Woolf. I never think dark will come is a truly impressive collection. Gill McEvoy
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Last of the Line, a pamphlet collection, was published in November 2021 by Maytree Press, having won their Three Trees Award. Its theme is family and Jewish background, and the title refers to the fact that because I have no children, the Jewish line in my family will die out with me – being Jewish is inherited through the mother.
The cover photograph shows my maternal grandparents, Etty and Elias (originally Ilya) Pishnoff.
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Susan Jordan’s Jewish heritage - so vividly and intimately realised in these poems - puts her at one remove from both the country of her birth and the culture into which she was born. It is this sense of feeling adrift that imbues the poems with a powerful objectivity, evoking the emotional distances between family members, spaces seemingly impossible to broach.
Each poem is like a beautifully - often painfully - created miniature, realised with the clarity and fresh pain of remembrance. If all this sounds bleak, Susan Jordan has a way of lightening the tone too. Her simple diction, by cutting straight to the heart of the matter, delivers the punch without self-indulgence, so that any hurt we might feel has an almost clarifying, cathartic force. Greta Stoddart
Tasting the Sweet Cold, my second pamphlet, was self-published in September 2023 with Mudlark Press. It's divided into two sections, Treats, a series of poems based around food, and What I'll Wear, a series based around clothes. Most of the poems are memories from childhood or later, and there are moments of sensuous enjoyment in them as well as times of unhappiness and discomfort. Stealing my father's threepenny bits to buy ice cream, having to wear red jeans when I wanted blue ones, recalling the outfits I wore as a student, savouring the delights of chocolate or summer pudding – these are some of the places the poems visit.
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Cover painting by Jane Ellis.
​These poems offer us vivid, sensual memories of being young. The mysterious customs, fears and longings of childhood are precisely and honestly evoked in language that is always well chosen and precise. This is generous and fearless exploration, and its particularity, so well remembered, will touch the child in every reader. Susan Jordan leads us on into student days and young adulthood, its colours, flavours, styles, then shocks us with a remarkable final poem. This is a collection that keeps giving and will repay many readings.
Christopher Southgate
