Selected Poems

Description

'One of the most serious and authoritative voices in contemporary British poetry' - Guardian Over seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside has built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and longing. In this Selected Poems we can see themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's sinuous lyric poise- the place of the individual in the world, the idea of dwelling, of home, within that community, and the lure of absence and escape set against the possibilities of renewal and continuity. This is consummate, immaculate work born out of a lean and agile craftsmanship, profound philosophical thought and a haunted, haunting imagination; the result is a poetry that makes intimate, resonant, exquisite music.

John Burnside is amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011 he became only the second person to win both the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes for poetry for the same book, Black Cat Bone. In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. He is a Professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.

"If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present, I feel it is here, in Burnside's singular music" -- Adam Thorpe Observer "A stunningly good writer of poetry and fiction" Independent "One of the most outstandingly gifted poets in Britain. He, like one of his subjects, is 'turned into the plainsong of the stars'" Scotsman "Burnside has a stillness and emotional restraint, a respect for the observer and observed alike which is serious, exemplary and rare" Times Literary Supplement "I love the way John Burnside looks at the world. He doesn't just look: he watches. He sees into the secret spaces that lie somewhere between the hidden and the revealed... [He] crafts a poetry as precise in its detail, as subtle in its perceptions, as respectful in its attentions as the blade of a brain surgeon's scalpel" -- Rachel Campbell-Johnston The Times