Black Cat Bone
Poems
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Winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, Black Cat Bone is the first American publication of the poetry of John Burnside
Before the songs I sang there were the songs
they came from, patent shreds
of Babel, and the secret
Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.
Hour after hour
the night trains blundered through
from towns so far away and innocent
that everything I knew seemed fictional:
—from "Death Room Blues"
John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is full of poems of thwarted love and disappointment, raw desire, the stalking beast. One sequence tells of an obsessive lover coming to grief in echoes of the old murder ballads, and another longer poem describes a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Black Cat Bone introduces American readers to one of the best poets writing across the Atlantic.
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.
