Burning the Heartwood is a first collection of lyric and pastoral poems. Janet Sutherland was born in Salisbury in 1957. After a childhood on a small dairy farm followed by studies at Cardiff and Essex Universities, she moved to Hackney, East London, and lived there for over twenty years, working in Local Government, for the voluntary sector and as an Adult Education woodwork tutor. Since 2001 she has lived in Lewes, East Sussex, with her partner and son. She currently works for Relate. Some of these poems were written prior to 1990, but the majority were written in Lewes, from 2001 onwards, after a writing gap of over ten years.