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"In her second collection, Sarah Connor leads us into a world where wolves are welcomed, gannets 'twist like glass' and 'fierce' hope is never far. From the achingly beautiful 'Working like a banshee' to the defiant 'O, my cartographer', Connor's poems, much like the 'Lady of Lichen' stand 'arms open' to whatever the storm throws. These poems will call you back."

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Ness Owen, author of Moon Jellyfish Can Barely Swim (Parthian)

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"Sarah Connor's new collection, The Poet Spells Her Name, is quite simply beautiful and deeply moving. It is written with such startling imagery and depth of emotion that so many of the poems took my breath away. Her poetry here has its own magic beneath ash trees, under the watchful eye of the moon, whispered in the darkness. I felt them tightly in my chest like a memory. I will read these poems again and again."

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Rachel Deering, author of Crown of Eggshell (Cerasus Poetry)

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"In The Poet Spells Her Name, Sarah Connor gives us a collection of poems that take the reader out into the wide night and the deep dark which ‘has its own gravity’. Verses are occupied with the company of wolves, the moon that is ‘teaching the sea to dance’. Even as the poet morns the loss of ash trees once ‘corseted with ivy’, she and her reader come to know migrations of birds as ‘an act of hope’. Connor’s work will visit you long after you have closed the pages, as you remember her words in places where ‘lost gods cling on’. " 

George Sandifer-Smith, Poetry Wales Reviews Editor and author of Empty Trains (Broken Sleep)

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“Whether she is conjuring the sudden apparition of a bird – a peacock’s colour rising out of dust, a moon as a thumbprint on an ink wash sky, or a haunted landscape of cigarette smoking dogs, Sarah Connor’s second-collection is filled with magic. Often stark in their simplicity, image after stunning image flashes out of the page and into the mind and heart. 

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At one point, the poet even turns the quotidian contents of a pocket into a moving catalogue of a life lived. From tin-foil foxes, to bone boxes and a meal of storms, ‘The Poet Spells Her Name’ is a collection to relish, full of poems with distinctive tangs and tastes that linger.” 

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Matt Gilbert, author of Street Sailing (Black Bough Poetry)