'...There is a brutality and a ruthlessness and a cruelty and casualness and abusiveness about 'slashed and dumped.'...in a sense you are administering the shock to yourself as well as hopefully to the world and the reader that this is what's being done...'dumped' is a brutal ending and is meant to be.' '...It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them...They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.' The Grauballe Man As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root. His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud. The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent of his slashed throat that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place. Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body' to his opaque repose? And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus's. I first saw his twisted face in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby, but now he