Description

A remarkable collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction

**WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023**

‘By far the best British poet alive’ SPECTATOR

‘A master of language’ HILARY MANTEL

In this powerful, moving book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised 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.

Publisher Review

For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive * Spectator * A master of language — Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall The joy of Burnside’s poems – and part of what makes them moving – is that he never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living * Observer * Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to do — Ali Smith, author of Autumn One of the most gifted poets writing today * Times Literary Supplement * Burnside has a lovely garrulousness that is distinctively his own — Tessa Hadley, author of Free Love John Burnside is a genius… He is constantly alive to alternative possibilities and versions of himself, as close yet unreachable as his own shadow. His responses to the world are so raw, it’s as if he’s missing a skin – or perhaps the rest of us have grown hides to make life manageable * Intelligent Life * A musician and chromaticist, he is a poet whose rapt, floating verse conjures up effects of great beauty in both the ear and imagination — Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley