Book description
Taking its title from Uccello's famous painting of a band of men - on
foot and on horseback - massing for the chase, John Burnside's new
poems take us on a journey out of the light and into the darkness,
where we may just as easily lose ourselves as find what we are
looking for.
In these poems of hunting and predation, Burnside explores our most
deep-rooted and primeval pursuits: romantic love, memory, selfhood,
grief, the recollection of the dead. Yet just as we seek, so are we
sought out: at any moment we may slide into loss or be gathered in by
some otherworldly light; at any moment, the angel of the annunciation
may seek us out and demand some astonishing transformation.
Even in the pursuit of love, or in the exercise of memory, we fall
into snares and become entangled in veils; just as we are always on
the point of discovery, so we are always a hair's-breadth away from
being lost. Concerned with love and mourning, with what we discover
and what remains hidden - with learning how to follow the trail
through the forest and find the way home - above all, these poems are
about the quest: knowing that whatever we bring back from the hunt, it
is always hard-won and never fully our own.
With this extraordinary collection of fleet and deftly beautiful
poems, John Burnside confirms his place at the forefront of writing,
as one of a handful of truly important British poets working today.
John Burnside's last two books were the novel,
A Summer of Drowning
, shortlisted for the 2011 Costa Prize; his poetry collection,
Black
Cat Bone
, which won both the 2011 Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize for
Poetry and, most recently, the short story collection,
Something Like Happy
.
