~~NOTOC~~ ====== Alien Crop ====== {{alien_crop.jpg|Book cover for Alien Crop}} **[[http://www.chapman-pub.co.uk|Chapman]] ISBN 1 903700 09 4** ===== From the Back Cover ===== Janet Paisley's poetry is never predictable, but always moulded by her distinctive character. She confronts painful experience and difficult, intimate emotions with understanding and mischievious humour. She celebrates sensuality, but fully conveys the intricacies of relationships. Her starting point is a woman's personal experience, but she speaks out about the real world, both its natural beauty and the suffering and joys of ordinary people. ===== Reviews ===== In **//Alien Crop//**, Janet Paisley’s poems have an intensity that makes them shine with truth… she enters Sylvia Plath territory and emerges looking more honest and passionate than Plath. She can be winningly self-deprecating and deadly serious at the same time… **Books in Scotland** --- //Robin Bell// **//Alien Crop//** - full of spells and incantations, the repetitions of balladry and folksong... **The Scotsman** --- //Tom Pow// ===== Extract ===== //**Alien Crop**// So the boats come in, \\ charcoal shadows etched on liquid gold - \\ she is not always so fine a mistress, \\ her depths combed smooth with light. \\ I have waited through nights \\ of her grey lady, webbed with mist \\ while she whispered her possession \\ on the bloodless stone. I have watched \\ her raking claws rise, a green harlot \\ shrieking spit, jealously making \\ her grave bed ready below the heaving sheets. \\ This dusk is still and holds the cat-purr \\ of engine and the call of voices, \\ clear on shore as if an echo sounded near. \\ You will come, a stranger dying in your eyes, \\ that man I have never known, tasting of tears, \\ salt fingerings in your hair, \\ her blood kisses whitening on your mouth. \\ I know only your feet at the fireside, \\ your hungers and your tossing sleep, \\ the wearing of you and the leavings. \\ It has been a long standing between us, \\ these dry shore waits but now, on this late tide \\ I feel the child swell within me. \\ I will wait your landfall, the wet \\ song of rope, the scrape of wood, the alien \\ crop of you, and know a new strangeness \\ for I, too, am fishing \\ in the drift of a setting sun.