Hard Graft by Di Slaney

Hard Graft by Di Slaney is a wry, tender and unsparing collection about illness, labour, animals, grief and the stubborn art of living.
Moving between brain tumour, rural life, hospital wards, graveyards, family history, desire, money, memory and care, Hard Graft asks what it means to keep going when the body becomes strange to itself. These poems do not sentimentalise illness, nor do they turn survival into easy triumph. Instead, they stay close to the work of living: the scan, the seizure, the prescription, the discharge lounge, the sheep field, the elderly parent, the beloved body, the unpaid invoice, the animal that must still be fed.
Here, mortality is never abstract. It arrives in an ambulance, in a hospital room, in a diagnosis, in the ache of joints, in the small humiliations and absurdities of the body. But so does life. It arrives in Dolly Parton, in bay rum, in road trips, in dirty jokes, in knitting, in desire, in livestock, in old photographs, in the stubborn comedy of carrying on.
Across its four movements, Hard Graft turns from memento mori towards memento vivere: from remembering death to remembering how fiercely, foolishly and tenderly we live.
And, perhaps, towards the hardest graft of all: staying alive.