Description

‘Lucid, tender and humane . . . One of the most formally agile and compassionate poets of our age’ Fiona Benson

Here you are, on the balcony,
the sea serenading you,
the sun with its armful of light.

In Afterburn, Blake Morrison returns to poetry, his first calling, to offers scenes from his own life and the lives of others. In psychology, ‘afterburn’ refers to the time before a past event is assimilated – an idea that resonates through these poems (which themselves linger after reading) about memory and our attempts to articulate, shape or contain it.

Throughout the collection, not least in two extraordinary sequences – one about his sister, the other about Elizabeth Bishop – the poet sees with new eyes the turning points in a life’s accidental course. What holds his wise, touching, melancholy yet joyful poems together are the small intimacies that bind us to others, under time’s lengthening shadow: ‘you moved too fast for me to catch you / and so did the years.’

Playful and charming, sometimes rakishly so, Afterburn nevertheless reveals an open, and vulnerable, heart.

***

‘Distils the insights of a seasoned memoirist into images that linger long after the final page’ Julia Copus
‘A master of the sonnet . . . I’m taking Afterburn to my desert island’ Hugo Williams

Publisher Review

‘Blake Morrison’s poems move with unforced grace between grief and illumination, discovering time and again the luminous in the everyday: the light that spills from a canoeist’s oars, the “feather-veins and spider-threads” of a wild fennel leaf… Following the gentle cadence of these poems we are led “bare-foot, soft-foot, lightsome as air” through a terrain of sharp-eyed domestic vignettes, a powerful sonnet sequence addressed to the poet’s late sister and deft refractions of Elizabeth Bishop’s prose. Plain-speaking, intensely humane, and musical, Afterburn distils the insights of a seasoned memoirist into images that linger long after the final page’ * Julia Copus * ‘It isn’t often you pick up a new book of poems without a shadow of literary anxiety hanging over your head. Morrison finds the subtlest feelings in the simplest of material, never the other way round. A master of the sonnet, he is never afraid of starting a poem, then pausing to let the subject matter tell him the rest of it. Every poem seems to be a spontaneous adventure into the unknown-till-now – ours, not his. One about different coloured marital teacups hanging on hooks actually made me cry. I’m taking Afterburn to my desert island’ * Hugo Williams * ‘In Afterburn Blake Morrison takes the quotidian details of our human existence and alchemizes them into poems that are beautifully accessible, lucid, tender and humane. From devastatingly poignant elegies for his sister to poems of furious dissent and protest, Blake Morrison proves himself one of the most formally agile and compassionate poets of our age’ * Fiona Benson *