Janet Paisley's poetry is very much 'in the world'. With a wry, full awareness… she reads the bones of human relationships. Her concerns are the joys and threats of being a parent, a lover, a child. Far from sentimental, she reveals a fierce compassion for those caught in grief or danger, especially the young. She evokes well the half-understood silences of a child's world, and the daft obsessiveness of the lover. Her language is energetic and deceptively simple, and, unlike many, she writes with a wisdom which has surely been won from experience - Kathleen Jamie

In Reading the Bones, Paisley explores relationships, between person and place, between lovers, but particularly those between parents and children, all the way from infancy to death. All relationships, conventional and aberrant, are observed with a sensitive, yet unsentimental, eye. She has the gift of being able to enter, fully, into the moment evoked - and to take us with her. And love, frustrated or fulfilled, is at the centre of it all - Aonghas Macneacail

Reviews

Reading the Bones - It is a remarkable complex literary journey… The Herald — Hayden Murphy

…by turns mocking, yearning, self-deprecatory and mordantly funny, making for an astringently lyrical effect… Scottish Book Collector — Mario Relich

Extract

Reading the Bones

This time it is not the child

but the man – racked and saddled

by hot sun. Over broken stone,

alone, he walks. Still upright

though burdened with the weight

that brings down worlds. Each step

is iron hard, small insects

dart in sharper shadows, cracks

open in the earth, and grief

is somewhere else – where water is.

The child he walks with is dead

yet he will not set it down.

Beyond the touch of hands, he

is merciless. Does not look back

to where he stopped last, wet

the child’s mouth – a smear of mist,

the almost kiss. Does not look

forward though he goes, a slow

sure stepping toward the grave.

Proud head, straight back, the painful

ribs, stripped sticks of arms, and legs

that walk and walk and walk

and are brought down more surely

by the bones I cannot read;

bones he carries on his back.

Is it son or daughter, love

or hope, or is he saddled to

the failure of his fatherhood

- the mouth he could not feed,

the need he could not fill, a life

he could not keep – so deep a grief

it cannot be set down. On

and on into the hungry heat,

sweating flies, and every step

an agony of bone and breath.

And I am trying, blindly

to read those bones – of Man,

walking his dead child home.