Following her poetry collection of home thoughts fromabroad, The Last Woman Born on the Island, Vagabond Voices is very pleased topublish this prolific poet’s latest collection, Things That Fruit in Darkness. As the title suggests, Sharon Black examines here the challenges we encounterin life and our resilience to them, demonstrating the breadth of her subjectmatter from one body of work to another. These poems uncover the hidden worlds of nature and of thehuman heart. Black explores how these two realms reflect each other and what wecan learn from this. Poems about the environment portray sheep, rain, types ofsoil, marine snow, mountains and a Hebridean apple tree that has been growingalone on a cliff face since the Ice Age – all held together by poems aboutlichen, which is not actually an organism but a relationship within a hybridcolony of bacteria, algae and fungi. The symbiosis of the lichen relationshipruns quietly throughout the book: the ways in which we relate to each other, toourselves and to our bodies: fragile and yet defiantly resistant
