Extracts from new reviews of 'A City Waking Up' by Sue Wallace-Shaddad

London Grip: Brian Docherty detects the voice of a woke woman in Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s new collection:

​"This short collection of 30 poems follows on from a 2104 self-published pamphlet, A Working Life, which according to Wallace-Shaddad’s wordpress site, ‘reflects aspects of her career with the British Council’. Only two poems in the present book, ‘The University of Khartoum’ and ‘The Talk’ might refer to the author’s working life. What we have is a sequence of poems set in Sudan, often specifically in Khartoum, with four dated to early 2019, concerning the political uprising there. (A BBC News website, 16 August 2019, and a Wikipedia article, ‘Khartoum Massacre’ are informative on these events.)

— Brian Docherty
Full review here: https://londongrip.co.uk/2020/11/london-grip-poetry-review-sue-wallace-shaddad/

And in the Suffolk Poetry Society's magazine, Anthony Johae writes:

"A City Waking Up – Sue Wallace-Shaddad

It is refreshing to read a pamphlet collection which takes us out of our customary milieu into
another culture. Although the author, Sue Wallace-Shaddad, does not hail from Sudan, she
nevertheless writes as an insider: someone who has not only lived and worked there, but who
also married a Sudanese academic, brought up a family in Khartoum and merged into the
culture of the country. But this is not a collection of poems focused on her, rather a series of
impressions of the place with which she and her family have been involved in the daily flow
of life, ending with the popular uprising in 2019, which led to the unseating of the President.
The title of the collection, therefore, captures both the city coming to life each day before the
desert sun scorches down and, in the last five of the thirty poems, the people of Sudan waking
up to the realization of a new era beginning for their society.
[...]
In A City Waking Up, Sue Wallace-Shaddad has depicted the diurnal rhythms of Sudanese
life with great poetic skill and lightness of touch. The last five “darker” poems, however,
remind us that underlying this cyclical way of life is a political narrative which is still in
process of unfolding."

— Antony Johae
The full review appears in the Suffolk Poetry Society Magazine (December 2020 issue)