Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
John Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. He died in 2024.For my money, <b>John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive</b>
Spectator
<b>A master of language</b>
- Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall,
The joy of Burnside's poems - and part of what makes them moving - is that <b>he never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living</b>
Observer
<b>Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to do</b>
- Ali Smith, author of Autumn,
Sadly Burnside’s final collection before his death…<i>Ruin, Blossom</i> embraces transition and the fleeting, fading, but ultimately renewing nature of all things. His<b> characteristically astute, finely observed </b>lines find the redeeming light in a challenged natural world
Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2024*
<b>One of the most gifted poets writing today</b>
Times Literary Supplement
<b>Burnside has a lovely garrulousness that is distinctively his own</b>
- Tessa Hadley, author of Free Love,
<b>John Burnside is a genius</b>... He is constantly alive to alternative possibilities and versions of himself, as close yet unreachable as his own shadow. His responses to the world are so raw, it's as if he's missing a skin - or perhaps the rest of us have grown hides to make life manageable
Intelligent Life
A musician and chromaticist, <b>he is a poet whose rapt, floating verse conjures up effects of great beauty</b> in both the ear and imagination
- Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley,
John Burnside was <b>one of the finest poets of his generation</b>, and with his death in May, we find poetry much the poorer… Burnside’s sharp, suturing language allows us to know the world as it is: ragged and broken, yet full of impossibly fragile beauty
Guardian
A remarkable collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction
**WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023**
'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL
In this powerful, moving book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins.
Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty – first sun streaming through the trees … a skylark in the near field, flush with song – as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness.
Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace – numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel’s wing – and the broken tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even with itself: the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but still finds chimes of light in the darkness – insisting that, here and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention, is all Annunciation.
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*