Gift Songs

If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present, I feel it is here, in Burnside's singular music

Adam Thorpe, Observer

I love the way John Burnside looks at the world. He doesn't just look: he watches. He sees into secret spaces that lie somewhere between the hidden and the revealed... [He] crafts a poetry as precise in its detail, as subtle in its perceptions, as respectful in its attentions as the blade of a brain surgeon's scalpel

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times

A stunningly good writer of poetry and fiction

Christina Patterson, Independent

The new appearance of a collection of John Burnside's poems is now an event... His has become a voice we rely on; he is a shaman-cum-seer who finds a lucid magic in the ordinary, a life of implication in passing moments, an X-ray truth, an inner light in our daily lives

Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday

Burnside has a stillness and emotional restraint, a respect for the observer and observed alike which is serious, exemplary and rare

Times Literary Supplement

One of the most outstandingly gifted poets in Britain. He, like one of his subjects, is 'tuned into the plainsong of the stars

Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman