Brittle Bones

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 (I typed ‘service’ at first – a Freudian slip?) 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.