Black Cat Bone

Product 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 & disappointment of raw desire of the stalking beast 'eye-teethand muzzlecoated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods & this is whythey 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 & possibly unknowable quarry Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel & the lyrics of Delta blues Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love faith hope & 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 & disciplined quest for what is actually there Full of risk & wonder Black Cat Bone shows the range of Burnside's abilities but also strikes out for new territories He remains consistently though one of our finest living lyric poets & each of these astonishing poems is as clear & memorable as 'a silver braceletfalling for daysthrough an inch & a halfof ice'