Reviews

In Alien Crop, Janet Paisley’s poems have an intensity that makes them shine with truth… she enters Sylvia Plath territory and emerges looking more honest and passionate than Plath. She can be winningly self-deprecating and deadly serious at the same time… Books in Scotland — Robin Bell

Alien Crop - full of spells and incantations, the repetitions of balladry and folksong… The Scotsman — Tom Pow

Extract

Alien Crop

So the boats come in,

charcoal shadows etched on liquid gold -

she is not always so fine a mistress,

her depths combed smooth with light.

I have waited through nights

of her grey lady, webbed with mist

while she whispered her possession

on the bloodless stone. I have watched

her raking claws rise, a green harlot

shrieking spit, jealously making

her grave bed ready below the heaving sheets.

This dusk is still and holds the cat-purr

of engine and the call of voices,

clear on shore as if an echo sounded near.

You will come, a stranger dying in your eyes,

that man I have never known, tasting of tears,

salt fingerings in your hair,

her blood kisses whitening on your mouth.

I know only your feet at the fireside,

your hungers and your tossing sleep,

the wearing of you and the leavings.

It has been a long standing between us,

these dry shore waits but now, on this late tide

I feel the child swell within me.

I will wait your landfall, the wet

song of rope, the scrape of wood, the alien

crop of you, and know a new strangeness

for I, too, am fishing

in the drift of a setting sun.