“Bone” by Yrsa Daley-Ward. Available in paperback and eBook format.  Published by Penguin UK.

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (26 Sept. 2017)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1846149665
• ISBN-13: 978-1846149665
• Amazon Link

Synopsis:

‘You will come away bruised.
You will come away bruised
but this will give you poetry.’

Raw and stark, the poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward’s breakthrough collection strip down her reflections on the heart, life, the inner self, coming of age, faith and loss to their essence. They resonate to the core of experience.

‘yrsa daley-ward’s ‘bone’ is a symphony of breaking and mending. an expert storyteller. of the rarest. and purest kind – daley-ward is uncannily attentive and in tune to the things beneath life. beneath the skin. beneath the weather of the everyday.’ nayyirah waheed. author of salt. and nejma

‘Sharing is her form of survival … A powerful collection of a woman facing tumultuous inner and external battles head on, delivered with a hard-hitting directness, yet with inflections of optimism throughout’ i-D Magazine

My Thoughts:

Now I admit not to reading modern poetry often, so I was really pleased to be sent this book.  The poems I read are mostly older classics, or the more well known mainstream ones. I am not up to date on poetic jargon so I am going to simply state what I found and thought, basically just the same as if I were reviewing a novel.

So this is what I consider to be a book of contemporary poetry.  I dipped in and out of this book over several days, reading a few shorter poems or one of the longer ones.  I found that the length of the poems range from short ones with only a couple of lines, to multiple verses over several pages.

I did find the poems interesting to read, though I admit to not understanding all of them. As I read I was aware that these are a mix of sad, emotional and feel they are very personal to the author, using her own experiences as a base.

This is a book I did enjoy and would recommend to readers of modern poetry, with some interesting and personal reflections.  I feel I was more experienced with the modern style I would have appreciated, or maybe understood more.

I was lucky enough to be drawn as a winner of this book on a giveaway run by Penguin Books.  There was a question asked as part of National Poetry Day.  The question was:  “What is your favourite poem ?”  My response was a poem I had to learn at school when I was around 11 years old.  We had to learn where every comma, colon, capital letter as well as every word by heart.  I remember at the time finding this very tedious.  But it is a poem that has stuck with me through the years.  That poem was called “The Listeners” by Walter De La Mare.  It begins :

About the Author:

Yrsa Daley-Ward is a writer of mixed West Indian and West African heritage. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Yrsa was raised by her devout Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in the small town of Chorley in the North of England.

Follow Yrsa Daley-Ward  Twitter

I was lucky to be picked as a winner of this book, “Bone” by Yrsa Daley-Ward, a competition run by Penguin UK on National Poetry Day.  The question from Penguin was “What is your favourite poem?”, now I know that it is a random draw, but my favourite poem was