The Bone Library

About this book

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Written in the old Dick Vet Bone Library during Jenni Fagan’s time as writer in residence, The Bone Library is rooted in a particular room and its atmosphere, with the sense of a mind working among stored lives and traces.

The poems move on a journey from there to here, examining and interpreting human life in its breadth. Across the collection, Fagan responds to identity, place, love, and the unloved, turning these themes over from different angles, sometimes close, sometimes reaching wider.

What emerges is a vivid exploration that is described as honest and searching, intent on getting beneath surface language and into what is felt. The setting lends its own charge, and the writing carries an energy that runs through the poems as they ask, again and again, what it is to be alive.