Brittle Bones

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Author photo © Andrea Freeman
	Janet Fisher Brittle Bones
	Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: 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). BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844714025 ISBN: 9781844714025 Author: Janet Fisher Title: Brittle Bones Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BB Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Jul-08 Extent: 80pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 11 mm Weight: 120 gms Supplier: Gardners Books Supplier: Ingram Book Group Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: NP Price: GBP 12.99 Price: USD 23.95 Rights: World	See larger image HARDBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£12.99~~ £10.39	Short description/annotation: Brittle Bones expresses vulnerability, an uncertainty leading to things lost (or gained). There are ‘personal history’ poems, showing with truth and love the disturbance lurking beneath the surface of civilised domestic life. Others run with a subject, ending up in unexpected places. Food plays an important role. Main description: 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. Meet the author Podcasts Play Brittle Bones (816 KB) 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 View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (448 KB) Excerpt from book: Brittle Bones birds’ legs, dried stalks a Chinese vase, a baby’s wave slivers of green on dead laburnum tracks translucent up an arm chalk line on a pavement, a child’s logic fingers pressing a wine glass stem change of key on the downbeat worn paths tracing the grass a moon thumbprinted on a light sky an old woman’s face, her knuckles strands of breath on a sharp morning cracked glaze on a bedroom jug its pattern of blue ivy and pouting lip the roots I clutch at on the way up Unpublished endorsement : Brittle Bones is Janet Fisher’s best book to date and therefore one of the best books in recent years. No-one writes quite like her. Her poems are crammed with things (a Dansette, building-site skips, balloons bunched from tram wires) and then more, more and more things, and all in so many places (Snowden, Skellig Michael, St Petersburg, Co. Kerry and Manhattan; or with the vivid backdrop of today’s West Yorkshire or an Oxfordshire childhood) – and yet the effect is of orderliness and above all of people, people living or remembered, clearly and with affection. Her poems are painterly – paintings on the edge of abstraction – but they’re also full of music; they’re often funny; and they can be tender and clear-eyed, whether about an ageing parent or the heartbreak of a miscarriage. I’ve found that once you start reading Fisher’s poems, you don’t want to stop. Peter Sansom Unpublished endorsement : Janet Fisher writes about people as if she had known them all her life. And yet, in a book so warmly peopled, she writes from that lonely spot within a crowd, that spot we all inhabit. Resolutely honest, trusting the plain truth to speak, Brittle Bones is a wonderfully buoyant collection which honours both the rich and drab texture of our lives, without value judgements but with a fierce sense of our commonality. I found such pleasure in Fisher’s latest book – a new kind of sadness, thoughtfulness (unworldliness almost), which makes the work all the richer. Mimi Khalvati Previous review quote: She finds new ways of presenting old truths. Jeffery Wheatly Orbis Previous review quote: Fisher has a talent for the acute angle, the oblique perspective, sudden shifts of light. She writes of how in ageing and illness, the familiar is made strange, using imagery that roots the imagined in the actual. Lavinia Greenlaw Mslexia Previous review quote: Fisher’s skill lies in making life’s ordinary moments illuminate broader themes, and it is this that makes [Women Who Dye Their Hair] a book of quality. Polly Bird New Hope International Previous review quote: A style that distils the kind of language you’d hear on the bus into a poetry that rings like a bell. Vic Allen Artscene Previous review quote: It’s a strong woman’s voice, hardened by time and tough choices … reality tempered by a knowing ear, that instinctively finds the music inherent in all good poetry. Jane Holland Blade