Black Cat Bone
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
John Burnside's remarkable 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.
‘The unmistakeable work of a master’ Times Literary Supplement
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The prolific Scottish poet, novelist, and memoirist (A Summer of Drowning) has such a high profile in the U.K. that it's a shock to realize this volume his 14th collection in Britain is his first set of poems to be published here. With his mellifluous pentameters, attention to the immaterial, and his turning aside from the ultramodern (though he remains modern), we might call Burnside Heaneyesque, though he is also Gothic, mythic, and almost (delightfully) morbid seeing death, or the dead, or bad omens, almost everywhere. "We live in peril, die from happenstance," he muses, "a casual slip, a fault line in the ice," though the skaters in this poem survive. Burnside's gift for narrative serves him in the quest that opens the volume, in which a man seeks "the curious/ pleasure of the doomed." Burnside's children, like his adults, are haunted, trailed by "a ghost in the undergrowth" and flanked by trappings of a religion that can express grief but cannot prevent it. "The things I love/ I bury in the woods/ to keep them safe." Readers of Burnside's memoirs will link the man's rough, unreliable upbringing, with an alcoholic fabulist father, to his unforgiving, unchanging spirit world; other readers might just lose themselves in the language, as if under a predator's ominous spell.
