John Burnside Book order

A remarkable new collection from our finest lyric poet 'One of the most gifted poets writing today' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR In this powerful, moving new book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognized that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins. Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty - first sun streaming through the trees ... a skylark in the near field, flush with song - as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness. Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace - numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel's wing - and the broken tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even with itself: the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but still finds chimes of light in the darkness - insisting that, here and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention, is all Annunciation.

In "Apostasie," John Burnside explores the shift from religious to earthly revelation and self-awareness, influenced by his Catholic upbringing. His poems invoke forgotten aspects of existence, highlighting the unseen world with vivid imagery, such as "starlight" as "rumor on the skin" and "pollen" scattered like "the timeless script of a world before the word."

The book was originally published in a slightly different format in Great Britain in 2019 by Profile Books Ltd. It offers insights or narratives that reflect its unique publication history and context.

Lucid, lyrical and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with real life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness.0Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, John Burnside's first collection of poetry in four years - from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. 0Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence.0 'For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator0** A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**

Essays on extinction, death, renewal and continuity by the acclaimed writer and poet. Prompted by his own near death experience Burnside reflects on the stories of the auroch, the great auk, and of humanity.

Though we might not realise it, our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the typewriter, ready to distil the essence of the moment, from the muddy wastes of the Western front to the vast reckoning that came with the end of empire. This is the first and only history of twentieth century poetry, by the acclaimed poet, author and academic John Burnside. Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist Russia, 1960's America and Ireland at the height of the Troubles, The Music of Time reveals how poets engaged with and shaped the most important issues of their times - and were in their turn affected by their context and dialogue with each other. This is a major work of scholarship, that on every page bears witness to the transformative beauty and power of poetry.

Praise for John Burnside: A master of language.--Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books

John Burnside's examination of place and utopia set on the remote island of Havergey.

From our earliest childhood experiences, we learn to see the world as contested space: a battleground between received ideas, entrenched conventions and myriad Authorised Versions on the one hand, and new discoveries, terrible dangers, and everyday miracles on the other.

What does it mean to live with integrity in the United States of America? That is the question haunting John Burnside's new novel... The way that Burnside layers these stories is masterful, and becomes a meditation on storytelling itself. Duncan White Daily Telegraph