Things That Fruit in Darkness

by Sharon Black

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.