Ash Tree

Sue Millard's Ash Tree is a poetic testament of love and grief; the journey of a grandchild's battle through cancer. Millard is witness and chronicler, touched by hope, anger, frustration, despair and love, but her writing avoids sentimentality. Its weight, balance and assurance speak directly to the reader.

"...the inexorable road of diagnosis, treatment, hope, despair and acceptance is chronicled with love alongside those aspects of everyday life which keep us going at such times - birds in the garden, a child drawing and the ash tree which becomes a metaphor for rebirth and renewal." Sue Allan, Cumbria Life

"Ash Tree - both powerful and poignant, anguished and eloquent in the telling." Kevin Hopkinson, Cumbria Magazine

" ... while readers will always be moved by the grief, so much is involved in the quality of the telling. ... Throughout the body of the book we read of the abiding and ultimately consoling presence of the natural world, which is ever there, both as counterpoint and complement. ... a touching and beautiful book." Robert Nisbet, London Grip

"It is a testament to Sue Millard's exceptional skill as a poet that the poems in her collection Ash Tree have the tensile strength to contain the raw material of their contents." Janni Howker, Ink, Sweat and Tears