Black Cat Bone
John Burnside
Black Cat Bone
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.
3.8 out of 5 based on 3 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
Poetry |
| Format |
Paperback |
| Pages |
80 |
| RRP |
£10.00 |
| Date of Publication |
August 2011 |
| ISBN |
978-0224093859 |
| Publisher |
Jonathan Cape |
| |
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.
Read The Omnivore's roundup for THE HUNT IN THE FOREST and WAKING UP IN TOYTOWN.
Reviews
The Independent
Fiona Sampson
"He is also simply one of the finest poets writing today. While the tiny handful of his British peers embraces clarity and a rhythmic steadiness, Burnside's poems resemble ragas more than traditional Western forms. Their organic shapes seem generated by their material, and by the running line of phrase leading to phrase, not quite a stream of consciousness but something close to it ..."
21/10/2011
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
Alan Brownjohn
"Black Cat Bone, winner of the 2011 Forward prize for best collection, is Burnside’s 12th volume, and his explorations of the mysteries of nature and the human psyche are as vivid and various as ever."
13/11/2011
Read Full Review
The Guardian
M Wynn Thomas
"A tour de force of liminal expression ... Where he seems to me not to be quite so successful is when he succumbs to the attractions of the "noir" – a Stevens phrase suggestive of Burnside's interest in the macabre, the morbid and the groteseque. This is the predominant mode of the section of poems collectively entitled Black Cat Bone ..."
06/09/2011
Read Full Review