Book description
John Burnside's remarkable new book is full of strange, unnerving
poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song. These are poems
of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking
beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that recognise
'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why/they fail to
love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a
sequence that echoes the old murder ballads, or of a hunter losing
himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable
quarry.
Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel
and the lyrics of Delta blues, Black Cat Bone examines
varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual
possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find - in
the forest or in our own hearts - ends in failure, we can now begin
the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually there.
Full of risk and wonder, Black Cat Bone shows the range of
Burnside's abilities, but also strikes out for new territories. He
remains consistently, though, one of our finest living lyric poets and
each of these astonishing poems is as clear and memorable as 'a silver
bracelet//falling for days/through an inch and a half/of ice'.
John Burnside has published eleven previous collections of poetry,
including among them
The Asylum Dance
, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, and six works of fiction -
most recently the novel,
A Summer of Drowning
, which came out in 2011. He has also written two books of memoirs,
A
Lie About My Father
and
Waking Up In Toytown
. His latest collection,
Black Cat Bone
, won both the Forward Prize for Poetry 2011 and the T. S. Eliot Prize
2011.
