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Black Cat Bone
John Burnside's 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 and 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, and 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 and possibly unknowable quarry.
Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and the lyrics of Delta blues, Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love, faith, hope and 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 and disciplined quest for what is actually there.
Full of risk and 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 and each of these astonishing poems is as clear and memorable as 'a silver bracelet // falling for days / through an inch and a half / of ice'.
Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and the lyrics of Delta blues, Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love, faith, hope and 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 and disciplined quest for what is actually there.
Full of risk and 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 and each of these astonishing poems is as clear and memorable as 'a silver bracelet // falling for days / through an inch and a half / of ice'.
80 pages, Paperback
First published September 12, 2011
22 people are currently reading
890 people want to read
About the author
John Burnside
96 books277 followersJohn Burnside was a Scottish writer. He was the author of nine collections of poetry and five works of fiction. Burnside achieved wide critical acclaim, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes. He left Scotland in 1965, returning to settle there in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. Laterly, he lived in Fife with his wife and children and taught Creative Writing, Literature and Ecology courses at the University of St. Andrews.
[Author photo © Norman McBeath]
[Author photo © Norman McBeath]
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 59 reviews
May 24, 2022
"Everyone becomes
the thing he kills
– or so the children whisper, when they crush
a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,
feeling the snuff of it bleed
through the grain of their fingers;
I’d always thought of that
as superstition:
a wishful thinking, how the spirit moves
from one shape to the next
like breath,
or warmth,
infinite kinship, laid down in the blood
against the sway
of accident and weather;
yet out in the woods that night, as I dug myself in
to wait for the day, I felt it in my gut,
a gravity I’d never known before
dragging me down
so it seemed I would cleave to the earth,
the life I had taken
snug as a second skin."
— The Fair Chase
the thing he kills
– or so the children whisper, when they crush
a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,
feeling the snuff of it bleed
through the grain of their fingers;
I’d always thought of that
as superstition:
a wishful thinking, how the spirit moves
from one shape to the next
like breath,
or warmth,
infinite kinship, laid down in the blood
against the sway
of accident and weather;
yet out in the woods that night, as I dug myself in
to wait for the day, I felt it in my gut,
a gravity I’d never known before
dragging me down
so it seemed I would cleave to the earth,
the life I had taken
snug as a second skin."
— The Fair Chase
December 28, 2019
Would it be redundant to say Burnside's writing is pure poetry? Some passages completely took my breath away.
Read
May 11, 2012Everyone becomes
the thing he kills
– or so the children whisper, when they crush
a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,
feeling the snuff of it bleed
through the grain of their fingers;
'The Fair Chase', 9.
the thing he kills
– or so the children whisper, when they crush
a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,
feeling the snuff of it bleed
through the grain of their fingers;
'The Fair Chase', 9.
March 1, 2023
yeah this is it
‘and a tiny hook-and-eye
unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart
you thought would never grieve or come undone.
May; and already
it’s autumn’
‘and a tiny hook-and-eye
unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart
you thought would never grieve or come undone.
May; and already
it’s autumn’
January 24, 2012
John Burnside’s new poetry collection, Black Cat Bone, has been winning awards all over the place – the Forward Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize – and seems almost in danger of becoming over praised. As far as I am concerned, the volume cannot be praised highly enough. John Burnside had always been one of those names I had heard, but never read. Earlier this month I bought his novel, The Summer of Drowning, which I’ve yet to read, and then I heard about his poetry. I’m glad I started with his poetry – he is a poet of some considerable depth and dark beauty. There is a bleak determinism to his verse, a sense of lives hollowed out on the margins of society, of lives lived in the shade of darkness. He is learned, but accommodating to outsiders. He is powerful, without being overbearing. The best of Black Cat Bone speaks to the human condition, illuminating it in strange, unorthodox ways. It is a poetry collection to be read more than once, to be studied, for it is through the rereading of such work that we discover the real truth, hidden just behind the lines. A wonderful collection, much deserving of its praise.
March 31, 2016
BLACK CAT BONE: POEMS
Written by John Burnside
2015; 80 Pages
Genre: poetry
★★★1/2
This is my first, but not last poetry collection by Burnside. I enjoyed most of his poetry and his storytelling element.
Written by John Burnside
2015; 80 Pages
Genre: poetry
★★★1/2
This is my first, but not last poetry collection by Burnside. I enjoyed most of his poetry and his storytelling element.
November 27, 2024
2024
I had a wildly different experience rereading these poems. This time I noticed more of a haunting decay.
2018
There is a vigorous life in the lyric of these poems, something like a ripeness of age with the remaining strength to enjoy and tackle a physical task (I picture snow shoveling).
I had a wildly different experience rereading these poems. This time I noticed more of a haunting decay.
2018
There is a vigorous life in the lyric of these poems, something like a ripeness of age with the remaining strength to enjoy and tackle a physical task (I picture snow shoveling).
June 22, 2019
Amazing poems. A couple favourites. Review to follow.
4-1/2 stars.
4-1/2 stars.
January 21, 2017
Huh, I can enjoy poetry.
I love my love with an X
and here she comes, now, now,
stealing across the fields and creeping round
to feed
my mouth
a sweet spot in the dark
she thinks is safe
until I drink her in.
(Hurts Me Too)
***
I wake next day, at first light, bleared with the sense
of having been someone else,
not in the dream so much as in
the fit between sleep and waking,
the true self walking away, through a woodland clearing,
the air so still, it seems he's chanced upon
an old belonging, something he couldn't believe
till now.
Safe sweet home, sweet home, through that shinin' star
And I wake, in the cage of my bones,
on the same cold ground.
(Bird Nest Bound)
***
At the back of my mind, there is always
the freight-line that no longer runs
in a powder of snow
(Hearsay)
***
Out in the dark, over the snow,
a barred owl flits
through the cottonwoods, slow
and far in the distance, no matter how close
to the window it comes, its pit-black call
more echo than threat, where the mind is a hall
and thought is the voice
of another.
(Insomnia in Southern Illinois)
I love my love with an X
and here she comes, now, now,
stealing across the fields and creeping round
to feed
my mouth
a sweet spot in the dark
she thinks is safe
until I drink her in.
(Hurts Me Too)
***
I wake next day, at first light, bleared with the sense
of having been someone else,
not in the dream so much as in
the fit between sleep and waking,
the true self walking away, through a woodland clearing,
the air so still, it seems he's chanced upon
an old belonging, something he couldn't believe
till now.
Safe sweet home, sweet home, through that shinin' star
And I wake, in the cage of my bones,
on the same cold ground.
(Bird Nest Bound)
***
At the back of my mind, there is always
the freight-line that no longer runs
in a powder of snow
(Hearsay)
***
Out in the dark, over the snow,
a barred owl flits
through the cottonwoods, slow
and far in the distance, no matter how close
to the window it comes, its pit-black call
more echo than threat, where the mind is a hall
and thought is the voice
of another.
(Insomnia in Southern Illinois)
May 28, 2018
Read most of this in one sitting in the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. A wild, strange book of excellent poetry. Going to need to get ahold of my own copy!
June 5, 2024
Beginning with a brilliant narrative poem from the perspective of Brueghel’s hunter, then several series of lyric poems. The title sequence features more snow-covered, Brueghel-infused lyric poems and blues lyrics
June 14, 2025
4.5/5
books i pick up by chance usually hit the hardest! John Burnside my new discovery
books i pick up by chance usually hit the hardest! John Burnside my new discovery
Read
January 22, 2023decidedly not a favourite among my JPB experiences but it's hard to deny that it Just Keeps Being Brilliant I'm getting more
August 19, 2012
Last week I tried to describe John Burnside's way with words — and the allure of those words — to my husband. "The only gift is knowing we belong / to nothing." This involved some hand-waving and muttering about burying those hands in moist, mossy earth and withdrawing them to discover worms among the hand-held loam, feeling not repulsion but a deep sense of satisfaction as life and death blur, suddenly indistinguishable. I failed (of course I failed), but believe I began in the right place by turning to nature in search of a poet who understands that we cannot always understand.
Black Cat Bone alludes to the magic of hoodoo. It begins with a murder. There's enchantment in the killing, the killer lost, the kill unknown and unknowable, time side-stepping any efforts to keep track of it, to make sense of what has happened, and leaving the killer close to death. There's respect. There are ghosts. They never fully reveal themselves, nor do they ever disappear, not completely. And they tell such stories. This 2011 work won the Forward Poetry Prize for best collection and the unexpectedly controversial T.S. Eliot Prize; it hardly needs a lesser word-crafter to extol its virtues. Instead I will share a few favorites and suggest that you, too, dig your hands into the ground and marvel at what you find in them, and inside of them, when they retrieve these pages.
Postscript: This was my first attempt at reading poetry on the Kindle. While the format did not detract from my enjoyment of the poems themselves, I certainly missed that awareness of the shape of each piece on the page. Clumsy analogy above notwithstanding, I think poetry should be tangible, held in hands that have more work to do than button-pressing. The best poems are surely page-turners — and not because an e-reader has cut them off with a single line to spare.
Black Cat Bone alludes to the magic of hoodoo. It begins with a murder. There's enchantment in the killing, the killer lost, the kill unknown and unknowable, time side-stepping any efforts to keep track of it, to make sense of what has happened, and leaving the killer close to death. There's respect. There are ghosts. They never fully reveal themselves, nor do they ever disappear, not completely. And they tell such stories. This 2011 work won the Forward Poetry Prize for best collection and the unexpectedly controversial T.S. Eliot Prize; it hardly needs a lesser word-crafter to extol its virtues. Instead I will share a few favorites and suggest that you, too, dig your hands into the ground and marvel at what you find in them, and inside of them, when they retrieve these pages.
On the Fairytale Ending
Begin with the fend-for-yourself
of all the loves you learned about
in story books;
fish-scale and fox-print
graven on the hand
forever
and a tiny hook-and-eye
unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart
you thought would never grieve
or come undone.
May; and already
it's autumn: broken gold
and crimson in the medieval
beechwoods, where our shadows come and go,
no darker
than the figures in a book
of changes,
till they're hexed
and singled out
for something chill and slender in this world,
more sleight-of-hand
than sorrow or safekeeping.
Moon Going Down
I have a dream.
She's in an attic room
with someone else,
hands in her skirt and that
dove sound caught in her throat
that I thought was ours.
She's with him now, she bends into his kiss
— and when she slows his hand, they swarm
like bees,
a honeyslick, an
aftergloss of meadow;
easy and damp,
though not without a trace
of venom, they are pure
as animals and
selfless,
like the rhythm in the heat
that, now and then, mistakes itself
for hunger;
and blessèd, strung like pearls on molten wire,
to bell and cry beneath a hunting moon,
they come together; live; unwarranted;
a braid in every touch, a flame for longing.
The Soul as Thought Experiment
Some days, it's enough to stand your ground.
Wind on the road and that coal oil and mackerel sheen
on everything you see; the wet
leylandii turned in the rain, like the fur-lined gaps
in children's books;
the blood eyes in the wall
no longer what you feared, but sweet as love
and feral, like the soul you disallow
to call this home.
It's winter now, and late in the afternoon,
but though it's a long shot, you still believe someone will call
from far out in the hills, the moonlight falling
sidewise through a casement, as she speaks
of history and colour, celadon
and murrey, and those days of ironwood
or gingko, where you cannot help but think
of kinship, at the point where snow begins
on some black road you thought was yours alone,
made bright and universal, while you listen.
Postscript: This was my first attempt at reading poetry on the Kindle. While the format did not detract from my enjoyment of the poems themselves, I certainly missed that awareness of the shape of each piece on the page. Clumsy analogy above notwithstanding, I think poetry should be tangible, held in hands that have more work to do than button-pressing. The best poems are surely page-turners — and not because an e-reader has cut them off with a single line to spare.
July 7, 2022
reading this is like listening to a grandparent talk about life and getting the sense that some things cannot be understood unless you are very old, and that other things cannot be understood at all.
some favourites:
flycatcher, dreamer, dolt,
companion to no one,
alone in a havoc of signs.
...
Everyone becomes
the thing he kills
— or so the children whisper, when they crush
a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,
feeling the snuff of it bleed
through the grain of their fingers;
I'd always thought of that
as superstition:
a wishful thinking, how the spirit moves
from one shape to the next
like breath,
or warmth,
infinite kinship, laid down in the blood
against the sway
of accident and weather;
(from 'The Fair Chase')
____
May; and already
it's autumn: broken gold
and crimson in the medieval
beachwoods, where our shadows come and go,
no darker
than the figures in a book
of changes,
(from 'On the Fairytale Ending')
______
'Loved and Lost'
Give me a childhood again and I will live
as owls do, in the moss and curvature
of nightfall
— glimpsed,
but never really seen,
tracking the lane
to a house I have known from birth
through goldenrod
and astrœmeria;
while somewhere,
at the far edge of the day,
a pintailed duck
is calling to itself
across a lake,
the answer it receives
no more or less remote than we become
to one another,
mapped,
then set aside, till we admit
that love divulged is barely love at all:
only the slow decay of a second skin
concocted from the tinnitus of longing.
___
a honeyslick, an
aftergloss of meadow;
easy and damp,
though not without a trace
of venom, they are pure
as animals and
selfless,
like the rhythm in the heat
that, now and then, mistakes itself
for hunger;
(from 'Moon Going Down')
___
I let her slip away, then stood, alone,
forgetting how the mind will travel far
to catch itself in blood and narrative:
(from 'Down by the River')
____
In the slow time, after the end, all you want
is home,
...
I wake next day, at first light, bleared with the sense
of having been someone else,
not in the dream so much as in
the fit between sleep and waking,
the true self walking away, through a woodland clearing,
the air so still, it seems he's chanced upon
an old belonging, something he couldn't believe
till now.
(from 'Bird Nest Bound')
___
and this is the grief
our stories prepared us for,
a ghost in the undergrowth,
hungry for nectar and blood
...
We have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why
they fail to love us,
turning away, like parents who cannot conceal
their disappointment, knowing, from the first,
that we are doomed, as they are, to a stark
momentum:
(from 'Neoclassical')
___
It seems a fable and perhaps it is:
we live in peril, die from happenstance,
a casual slip, a fault line in the ice;
but surely it's the other thought that matters,
the sense that, now and then, there's still a chance
a man might slide towards an old
beloning, momentarily invovled
in nothing but the present,
(from 'Pieter Brueghel: Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap, 1565')
__
In Northen Canada,
it's summer now
and birds that look like friends I had in school
are dancing in a field of moss and thaw
and, as I watch, the darkness gathers round me
slowly, warmth and quiet in its gift
(from 'Late Show')
some favourites:
flycatcher, dreamer, dolt,
companion to no one,
alone in a havoc of signs.
...
Everyone becomes
the thing he kills
— or so the children whisper, when they crush
a beetle or a cranefly in the dust,
feeling the snuff of it bleed
through the grain of their fingers;
I'd always thought of that
as superstition:
a wishful thinking, how the spirit moves
from one shape to the next
like breath,
or warmth,
infinite kinship, laid down in the blood
against the sway
of accident and weather;
(from 'The Fair Chase')
____
May; and already
it's autumn: broken gold
and crimson in the medieval
beachwoods, where our shadows come and go,
no darker
than the figures in a book
of changes,
(from 'On the Fairytale Ending')
______
'Loved and Lost'
Give me a childhood again and I will live
as owls do, in the moss and curvature
of nightfall
— glimpsed,
but never really seen,
tracking the lane
to a house I have known from birth
through goldenrod
and astrœmeria;
while somewhere,
at the far edge of the day,
a pintailed duck
is calling to itself
across a lake,
the answer it receives
no more or less remote than we become
to one another,
mapped,
then set aside, till we admit
that love divulged is barely love at all:
only the slow decay of a second skin
concocted from the tinnitus of longing.
___
a honeyslick, an
aftergloss of meadow;
easy and damp,
though not without a trace
of venom, they are pure
as animals and
selfless,
like the rhythm in the heat
that, now and then, mistakes itself
for hunger;
(from 'Moon Going Down')
___
I let her slip away, then stood, alone,
forgetting how the mind will travel far
to catch itself in blood and narrative:
(from 'Down by the River')
____
In the slow time, after the end, all you want
is home,
...
I wake next day, at first light, bleared with the sense
of having been someone else,
not in the dream so much as in
the fit between sleep and waking,
the true self walking away, through a woodland clearing,
the air so still, it seems he's chanced upon
an old belonging, something he couldn't believe
till now.
(from 'Bird Nest Bound')
___
and this is the grief
our stories prepared us for,
a ghost in the undergrowth,
hungry for nectar and blood
...
We have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why
they fail to love us,
turning away, like parents who cannot conceal
their disappointment, knowing, from the first,
that we are doomed, as they are, to a stark
momentum:
(from 'Neoclassical')
___
It seems a fable and perhaps it is:
we live in peril, die from happenstance,
a casual slip, a fault line in the ice;
but surely it's the other thought that matters,
the sense that, now and then, there's still a chance
a man might slide towards an old
beloning, momentarily invovled
in nothing but the present,
(from 'Pieter Brueghel: Winter landscape with skaters and bird trap, 1565')
__
In Northen Canada,
it's summer now
and birds that look like friends I had in school
are dancing in a field of moss and thaw
and, as I watch, the darkness gathers round me
slowly, warmth and quiet in its gift
(from 'Late Show')
February 5, 2013
In a disturbing and thought provoking collection, Burnside explores the natural and the numinous. The poems teem with animals - fireflies, snakes, broken birds and unnamed quarry and humans 'as animals' or 'feral' in love.
Burnside captures nature - a depression in the grass 'where something had lain / in a fetor of blood warmth and pollen', an owl living in the 'moss and curvature / of nightfall'. Yet he also pins down what is unseen or left unsaid - the hunted creature that is killed but unidentified, the 'giggle' of a hyena in a bush and mysterious footprints in landscapes muffled by snow.
This collection rewards rereading. At times I felt like one of the characters on Brueghel's painting, merely skating on the surface. But every time I returned to the poems they yielded more, as I went deeper under the surface, like the 'silver bracelet / falling for days / through an inch and a half / of ice'.
Burnside captures nature - a depression in the grass 'where something had lain / in a fetor of blood warmth and pollen', an owl living in the 'moss and curvature / of nightfall'. Yet he also pins down what is unseen or left unsaid - the hunted creature that is killed but unidentified, the 'giggle' of a hyena in a bush and mysterious footprints in landscapes muffled by snow.
This collection rewards rereading. At times I felt like one of the characters on Brueghel's painting, merely skating on the surface. But every time I returned to the poems they yielded more, as I went deeper under the surface, like the 'silver bracelet / falling for days / through an inch and a half / of ice'.
Read
February 26, 2022A lovely collection with some really beautiful imagery and delicate wording. Unfortunately, it was slightly too abstract for me to feel like I could really understand or enjoy at some points. I understand this is a failing on my part after having not read or studied poetry for such a long time, but it did leave me feeling a little alienated and underwhelmed.
I may come back for a re-read and I'll definitely look into reading his fiction.
I may come back for a re-read and I'll definitely look into reading his fiction.
January 25, 2017
I think I have just been #burnsided!!!
Stunning, atmospheric, clever, sad, disturbing, so good! I read every poem dozens of times, there is so much in each one.
I need more.
Stunning, atmospheric, clever, sad, disturbing, so good! I read every poem dozens of times, there is so much in each one.
I need more.
November 12, 2024
This collection is wild and unnerving with a clear love of landscapes that seeps out of the pages and makes me homesick for places I've never been.
November 5, 2025
WARM, WISE, BRAVE and CARING SOUL
I came to John Burnside's poetry from reading his 'Nature' columns in the New Statesman. This book is, of course, very different, but even on a quick first reading I knew I was encountering serious art.
His diction is original and impressive a lot of the time, but he does drop in a few off-putting words that sound close to Americanisms. He is certainly very good at using nouns in a tangential way that turns them into very fresh imagery.
There are some repetitions of vocabulary in later parts of the book which lessened the impact at times. When his expressions come fully alive, however, they are deep and dark but also uplifting, and I felt I was in the company of a warm, wise, brave and caring soul.
A quick reading cannot bring out the full riches of a text like this, so I shall be returning to it and soaking it up properly in the near future.
I came to John Burnside's poetry from reading his 'Nature' columns in the New Statesman. This book is, of course, very different, but even on a quick first reading I knew I was encountering serious art.
His diction is original and impressive a lot of the time, but he does drop in a few off-putting words that sound close to Americanisms. He is certainly very good at using nouns in a tangential way that turns them into very fresh imagery.
There are some repetitions of vocabulary in later parts of the book which lessened the impact at times. When his expressions come fully alive, however, they are deep and dark but also uplifting, and I felt I was in the company of a warm, wise, brave and caring soul.
A quick reading cannot bring out the full riches of a text like this, so I shall be returning to it and soaking it up properly in the near future.
March 10, 2025
Loved and Lost
Give me a childhood again and I will live
as owls do, in the moss and curvature
of nightfall
-glimpsed,
but never really seen,
tracking the lane
to a house I have known from birth
through goldenrod
and alstroemeria;
while somewhere,
at the far edge of the day,
a pintailed duck
is calling to itself
across a lake,
the answer it receives
no more or less remote than we become
to one another,
mapped,
then set aside till we admit
that love divulged is barely love at all:
only the slow decay of a second skin
concocted from the tinnitus of longing.
Give me a childhood again and I will live
as owls do, in the moss and curvature
of nightfall
-glimpsed,
but never really seen,
tracking the lane
to a house I have known from birth
through goldenrod
and alstroemeria;
while somewhere,
at the far edge of the day,
a pintailed duck
is calling to itself
across a lake,
the answer it receives
no more or less remote than we become
to one another,
mapped,
then set aside till we admit
that love divulged is barely love at all:
only the slow decay of a second skin
concocted from the tinnitus of longing.
May 2, 2025
john burnside’s strengths in this book definitely come down to his mastery in ambiguity and use of different speakers. the layers of concepts were put together so interestingly. specifically in the longer piece “The Fair Chase”, the narrative was so intense and strong it was a great inspiration. other sections were a bit convoluted at times or straight up unappealing to the poetry i was wanting but overall a really well put together collection that my literature for poets class picked apart with exceptional clarity!
August 22, 2025
...we live in peril, die from happenstance,
a casual slip, a fault line in the ice;
but surely its the other thought that matters,
the sense that, now and then, theres still a chance
a man might slide towards an old
belonging, momentarily involved
in nothing but the present, skating out
towards a white
horizon, fair
and gifted with the grace
to skate forever, slithering as he goes,
but hazarding a guess that someone else
is close beside him, other to his other.
- 'Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap, 1565'
a casual slip, a fault line in the ice;
but surely its the other thought that matters,
the sense that, now and then, theres still a chance
a man might slide towards an old
belonging, momentarily involved
in nothing but the present, skating out
towards a white
horizon, fair
and gifted with the grace
to skate forever, slithering as he goes,
but hazarding a guess that someone else
is close beside him, other to his other.
- 'Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap, 1565'
September 25, 2022
Gorse bones and Samson’s weakness: begins with and follows corridors of remarkable insight, John Burnside is a maverick; a harrowing genius. There are few books of mention in the cannon of poetry that deserves the honors of top 50 poetry books in existence; I believe this would bode some heft among the ranks of that listomania. Black Cat Bone, named after a hoodoo talisman, is a quandary of not affairs of love perchance but brooding old gods of worship.
August 13, 2017
"We have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why they fail to love us,
turning away, like parents who cannot conceal
their disappointment, knowing, from the first,
that we are doomed, as they are, to a stark
momentum: something hidden in the grass
outwearing us, who never know our fates,
and drowning them, in abstract, like the dreams
they once replaced, in waves of moss and ivy."
turning away, like parents who cannot conceal
their disappointment, knowing, from the first,
that we are doomed, as they are, to a stark
momentum: something hidden in the grass
outwearing us, who never know our fates,
and drowning them, in abstract, like the dreams
they once replaced, in waves of moss and ivy."
August 31, 2019
This isn’t the type of poetry collection I’d ordinarily read. The imagery is cold and so often focused on winter but I found I quite enjoyed the writing style once I got into the flow of the first poem.
January 30, 2023
The prevailing thought while reading these poems was that someone ought to seriously look into John Burnside’s past and any unsolved murders near him over the years. What bodies are you hiding, John??
November 14, 2018
Only okay, the words just don't flow :(
November 30, 2020
I feel like this volume of poems is reminiscent of the Romantics in style while being very modern in theme and tone. I quite enjoyed this collection.
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