Bone Monkey

This disturbing new collection from Janet Sutherland explores the deeply mischievous, but darkly malevolent figure of Bone Monkey. A trickster who has always existed, he's one of the old gods who sprang to life fully formed. Sitting on the shoulders of men and women through the ages, he is by turns perpetrator and poet, murderer and lover, gardener and carer. With sonnets, ballads and lyrical free verse Bone Monkey wanders through a series of shamanic creation myths into reveries on memory, love and loss. If he is brutal and amoral at times, he is also a dreamer rejoicing in those 'longings to eat the whole world', as Robert Bly has it, which are intrinsically human.

Janet Sutherland was born in Wiltshire and grew up on a dairy farm. She has an MA in American Poetry from the University of Essex. Her poems are widely anthologised: from The Virago Book of Love Poetry to The New British Poetry 1968-88 (Paladin). Her essay 'Reznikoff and his Sources' appeared in the recent Black Sparrow (US) and Five Leaves (UK) editions of Reznikoff's 'Holocaust'. She lives in Lewes, East Sussex. Bone Monkey is her third collection.