Bone Skid, Bone Beauty - Paperback

by Jane Creighton (Author)

Bone Skid, Bone Beauty is a collection of poems deeply absorbed in a language that thinks through the body and the body's memory of place, of love, and of losses sustained over time. These poems suggest that what matters within and beyond the pain of sorrow is the tenacity of thought voiced in words, such that "A mind / just hours ago paddling toward the riverbank path / that leads through pastel fields abundant with a soft / and satisfied wealth, now picks its pace / through a glimmering redness, burnt packages / of ideas that nevertheless court hope / in their rapid demise." These poems seed landscapes from the North Atlantic coastline to the far west deserts of Texas with the cadences and syntax of a poet intent on drawing knowledge from what she sees in order that she might give voice to breath and sing an urgent and radiant love for this world.

"Great pleasure can be found in the cadences and musicality of Creighton's lines, in the perfect fit of idea and image; also, there is great surprise and pain in being taken down into the intimacies of grief. This work is motivated overall by what the unsettling presence of the dead signifies for the living."