Spine, Jane Weir

Walking the BlockA book of quiet insistence, Spine reads the body as a landscape of memory, tenderness, fracture and repair. In crisp, delicate lines, Jane Weir charts what lies beneath—tension, structure, vulnerability—while treating the spine as metaphor: skeletal core, axis, line of inheritance. The poems are spare but resonant; each stanza folds into touch, gesture, anatomical echo. You sense muscle meeting bone, the hush between vertebrae, grief in the hinge of movement. The collection feels like textile—lines interlacing, pressure understood, support tested—offering not revelation but recognition.

This collection invites close reading, attentive to the spaces between words as one might attend to the weft between warp. Weir’s imagery — medical diagrams, skeletal maps, bodily whisper — evokes craft as much as corporeality. Her poems do not show off, but shape a felt structure, a frame, a secret posture of resilience.

About the Author
Jane Weir (b. 1963) is an Anglo‑Italian writer, designer and poet whose work bridges craft history and lyric imagination. Winner of the Wigtown Poetry Prize and celebrated for her sensitive textual portraits, she is the author of Walking the Block (2008) and Spine (2012) — poetic biographies that explore textile-making figures through archival empathy. A contributor to Selvedge, PN Review and Faber anthologies, Weir’s work is deeply rooted in material culture and language-as-structure.

Publication date: 2012
Publisher: Templar Poetry
Pages: 156
ISBN: 9781906285111