Brittle Bones: (Salt Modern Poets)

Brittle Bones expresses vulnerability, an uncertainty leading to things lost (or gained). The book starts with a series of rooms – places to move from, or areas of discovery. Tragedy, grief, dying or the likelihood of dying, evolve throughout, linking into stories of childhood, growing up, travelling, family – the disturbance that lurks beneath the surface of civilised domestic life. Nothing is as it seems. But the book’s not an autobiography. I don’t trust the advice `write about what you know’. Writing from what you know or have experienced, or can remember, is a different matter. But why stop there? Write from what you don’t know. What’s the imagination for? I take a phrase, or a subject such as a painting, and run with it, see where it ends up. The results surprise me as much as the reader is, I hope, surprised. It’s not all doom and gloom. There’s plenty of sharpness and wit – not for their own sakes but as ways of getting truth across. And masses of food (purely as metaphor, of course). I don’t write for an audience. Each poem is written for myself, expressing something which resounds with me in some way. But the book has been put together with the reader in mind. After all, when someone starts to read a book there’s a relationship between reader and writer. A good reader puts as much in and gets as much out as the writer. And of course you are all good readers.

Table of Contents:
Getting There Chopsticks Rusholme Our Lady Dream Brittle Bones For Ella Mud Hope Turano Pietà Skellig Michael The Wall Summer Cold Front Wishes Girl With Ferret Czech Border Crossing. 1991 'She Sips a Pale White Cup of Tea' St Petersburg The Dress Looking for the Chocolate Factory, Co. Kerry What Shall We Do Now? Get Over It To a Secret Agent Moving Pictures He Carries His Innocence About Him Benevolent Advice The Art of Politics The Naughtiest Girl in the School The Fishmonger's Daughter Product Placement Cath Spinney Breakfast Dancing Class Last Dance Theatre Chalk Farm Pica Anniversary Dawn, North London Candling Domestic Snapshot Fruit Me and Ashbery Riding Shotgun on the M6, He rang me yesterday Pipe Deals Patch Cousin Adelaide Ringing Margaret Swiss Pass Maggie Smoke On Not Being Able to Drive Summer Exhibition Brighton Beach, 1960 Forest Rain Picking Elderflowers Gina's Story Canon How to Do Nothing

About the Author :
Janet Fisher was born in Birmingham in 1943. She read Law at Bristol University, followed by five years’ legal publishing experience. After a move to Yorkshire and a period of illness, she began to develop herself as a writer. In 1989 she joined The Poetry Business in Huddersfield as co-director with Peter Sansom. She has had two previous main poetry collections: Listening to Dancing (1996) and Women Who Dye Their Hair (2001).

Review :
A powerful aspect of this poet’s work is her ability to locate the precise, authentic image without overplaying her hand... Her work is imbued with energy and pace, the elegance of tone and form and her gift for the vernacular.