The Lock-Picker

Sue Proffitt's remarkable second poetry collection, The Lock-Picker, is about living alongside her mother who was suffering from dementia. Her poems explore the nature of self, memory, identity and what it truly means only to exist in the present moment. The journey from first diagnosis to its inevitable end is shown with shattering intimacy ... as if we are beamed into the scene itself.... these poems do not try to tidy or disguise; they are unflinching in their honesty and their 'refusal to forget'. There are few collections that cover this ground, and in such a way that the reader and perhaps other carers, might feel changed as a result, wiser, kinder, and as Sue Proffitt hopes in her preface, 'a little less alone'