"Bone Monkey is Janet Sutherland’s third collection, a subtle and finely tuned handling of archetypal materials that takes its unlikely bearings from Robert Bly. But is her mischievous mimicking monkey, who reels from bloody impaling to murderous mayhem, a figure of vanity who evokes tenderness but feels none, a grinning war-mongering vacancy who appears to die but is perhaps eternal, really what the author of Iron John intended by way of a celebration of masculine virtues? Maybe not. It’s fun though, and Sutherland appears to like him, although she is meant to be subverting rather than celebrating male mythologies. She circles her subject making faces at it. Reading on, we discover a gently probing wit, a great variety of miniature lyrical forms with off-rhymes, traditional sonnets, ballads and rumbustious dark historical narratives, and the bone monkey reappears in still more guises: a ruthless solver of crosswords, a sonneteer who subverts the cliché about monkeys and typewriters by tapping out lines on his laptop that ‘seize the flaming substance of the world’, a care worker tending a dying old woman: 

​

when she wakes 
he soft-boils an egg 
and parts her lips with a spoon 

yolk lines a lip crease 
he loosens the edges with his nail 
picks at the oily flakes 

he puts three spoons of sugar in her tea 
clips on the beaker lid 
and offers her the straw 

                                                           (‘Vespula Vulgaris’) 

Spooky, complex, resistant to careless reading, Bone Monkey is a book that repays a reader’s patience. Janet Sutherland is a fine poet." 
(John Muckle in PN Review 222, Volume 41 Number 4, March - April 2015)