The Knucklebone Floor is partly a verse biography of Susan Davidson (1796-1877), who spent
thirty years landscaping and developing the grounds of Allen Banks in Northumberland,
including woodland,
paths, rustic bridges and a summerhouse with a knucklebone floor. It is
also a book about boundaries and wilderness, fragility and resilience, flora
and fauna, people and places, then and now, women and men, the human world and
the natural world. Richly and formally inventive, it offers a collective perspective of history, identity and ecology at
a time of global fragmentation and ecological crisis.