Magnetic South

You are my magnetic south.
I fall to you true.

I am the eel, the gull,
the silvery fish,
returning and returning.

Yours is the tide I swim to.

Sue Wootton
From Magnetic South, Steele Roberts, 2008

Sue Wootton’s most recent poetry collection is The Yield (Otago University Press, 2017), which was a finalist in the 2018 Ockham New Zealand book awards. She has held the Robert Burns Fellowship, the NZSA Beatson Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. In 2025 she was awarded the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, for a suite of sonnets called ‘Holding Patterns: Seven songs of pots, jars, bowls and vases’. Sue lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, and is the publisher at Otago University Press. The poem ‘Magnetic South’ is from her 2008 collection of the same name, published by Steele Roberts.

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