John Burnside's remarkable 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 lo...

As a child, Luke’s mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language.As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals – tiny hearts revealed still pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the death of his mother, Luke’s obsession deepens, resulting in a haunting and biza...

As he sets out on his first adventure in life, a young man enters the dark realm of adult violence; a married suburbanite longs for the wide, mysterious world that seems to hover just beyond the next turn in the road; a pair of disturbed twins commit a pointless crime; and the boy of the title story, at once appalled and beguiled by the glamour of others, has all his hopes and expectations exposed by a senseless murder.Burning Elvis is a book about innocence and fear, abou...

Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in The Asylum Dance - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry - are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is territory that Burnside has made his own: a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no man's land - the 'somewhere in between' - of dusk or dawn, of mists or sudden light, where the epiphanies are.Using the framework of four long poems, 'Po...

Twenty five years ago, during the spring and summer of 1975, a rapist stalked the streets of Cambridge, attacking young, single women in their bed-sits and flats and subjecting them to horrifying and increasingly violent assaults. For several months the city endured a climate of fear and suspicion, where the old assumptions about sexual relations and civic decency fell into question, and no male could be taken at face value. These events for the background to The Locust Room, John Burnside...

Over seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace.In this Selected Poems, his territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and longing.We can see themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's s...

A breakthrough book of poetry by one of the most exciting young poets in Britain. Dealing with issues of childhood, betrayal and domestic and sexual violence, SWIMMING IN THE FLOOD is Burnside's darkest and most powerful collection yet.

Winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, Black Cat Bone is the first American publication of the poetry of John Burnside*Before the songs I sang there were the songsthey came from, patent shredsof Babel, and the secretNineveh of back rooms in the dark.Hour after hourthe night trains blundered throughfrom towns so far away and innocentthat everything I knew seemed fictional:*—from "...

An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller—and to learn how his anarchist sensibility can help us escape “the air-conditioned nightmare” of the modern worldThe American writer Henry Miller's critical reputation—if not his popular readership—has been in eclipse at least since Kate Millett's blistering critique in Sexual Politics, her landmark 1970 study of misogyny in literature and art. Even a Miller fan like the acclaimed Scottish writer John Burns...

Acclaimed author John Burnside delivers a profound, page-turning novel about innocence, evil, morality, and the dark corners of the human psyche.Mysterious illnesses affect the inhabitants of the post-industrial village of Innertown, and a pervasive sense of malaise hangs everywhere. So when teenage boys disappear into the poisoned woods surrounding the village’s abandoned chemical plant, no one notices, or if they do, they don’t say a thing. Not even the town’s only cop, whose lea...

A novel of mysterious beauty, The Devil's Footprintsexplores the elemental forces of everyday life: love, fear, grief, and the hope of redemption.Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life yet still feels like an outsider. Married but distant from his wife, he discovers that a school friend, Moira Birnie, has killed herself and her two sons by setting their car ablaze. However, she spared her fourteen-year-old daughter, Hazel. As teenagers, Michael and Mo...

A revelatory and deeply personal history of twentieth-century poetry by prize-winning poet and memoirist John BurnsidePoetry helps us to make sense of our world, transforming what the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam called the "noise of time" into a kind of music. The Music of Time is a unique history of twentieth-century poetry by one of today's most acclaimed poets, blending incandescent personal meditations with rare insights about a broad range of poets w...