Black Cat Bone

Product Description

John Burnsides 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 Burnsides 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 bracelet//falling for days/through an inch & a half/of ice.