Black Cat Bone
  • Published: 15 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780224093859
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $32.99

Black Cat Bone

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Winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry 2011 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2011

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 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.

‘The unmistakeable work of a master’ Times Literary Supplement
  • Published: 15 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780224093859
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

John Burnside

John Burnside is amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011 he became only the second person to win both the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes for poetry for the same book, Black Cat Bone. In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. He is a Professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.

portrait photo of John Burnside

Also by John Burnside

The Empire of Forgetting
Ruin, Blossom
Learning to Sleep
Still Life with Feeding Snake
Ashland & Vine
I Put a Spell on You
All One Breath
See all

Praise for Black Cat Bone

Burnside's inward eye has never been clearer, his poetic voice never more plainly lovely.

Candia McWilliam

The unmistakable work of a master

Bernard O’Donoghue, Times Literary Supplement

A tour de force of liminal expression... Burnside is not a wispily ethereal poet. A stretch of country crossed during the hunt is captured in oils, not in thin watercolours...poignantly luminous...[an] engrossing collection

M. Wynn Thomas, Guardian

Black Cat Bone is a deserving winner of this year's Forward Prize for best collection. John Burnside's twelfth volume adds to and deepens a body of poetry that is already exceptionally significant - and utterly recognisable. A musician and chromaticist, he's a poet whose rapt, floating verse conjures up effects of great beauty in both the ear and the imagination

Fiona Sampson, Independent

A haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness. In an exceptional year, it is an outstanding book, one which the judges felt grew with every reading

Gillian Clarke, chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize

One of the most gifted poets writing today

Paul Batchelor, Times Literary Supplement
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