Ruin, Blossom
  • Published: 11 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529921649
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 80
Categories:

Ruin, Blossom

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
23 Jul 2024
EBook
11 Apr 2024
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A remarkable new collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction - from our finest Scottish lyric poet

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.

*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*
  • Published: 11 April 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529921649
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 80
Categories:

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
Learning to Sleep
Still Life with Feeding Snake
Ashland & Vine
I Put a Spell on You
All One Breath
Something Like Happy
See all

Praise for Ruin, Blossom

For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive

Spectator

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

Burnside has a lovely garrulousness that is distinctively his own

Tessa Hadley, author of Free Love

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

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

One of the most gifted poets writing today

Times Literary Supplement

Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to do

Ali Smith, author of Autumn

A master of language

Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall

Sadly Burnside’s final collection before his death…Ruin, Blossom embraces transition and the fleeting, fading, but ultimately renewing nature of all things. His characteristically astute, finely observed lines find the redeeming light in a challenged natural world

Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2024*

John Burnside was one of the finest poets of his generation, and with his death in May, we find poetry much the poorer… Burnside’s sharp, suturing language allows us to know the world as it is: ragged and broken, yet full of impossibly fragile beauty

Guardian

Poetry of this quality is experienced before it is understood… as one does when reading a Shakespeare comedy or an ode by Keats

Scotsman

A beautiful collection of meditative lyrics

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

In typically spare and elegant lines, these precious last poems turn away from religious faith or a mystical higher purpose, but nonetheless find solace and meaning in the natural world: unsentimental, beautiful, precarious, enduring

New Stateman, *Books of the Year*
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