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The Asylum Dance
  • Published: 15 November 2009
  • ISBN: 9780224090056
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $32.99

The Asylum Dance

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Dec 2010
Tr. Paperback
15 Nov 2009
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A Whitbread Prize-winning collection of poems that are 'lyrical, tough, often oddly sinister... and can up-end your mood like a drug or a dream' (Gordon Burn, Independent).

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, 'Ports', 'Settlements', 'Fields' and 'Roads', the poet balances presence with absence; we are shown the homing instinct - felt in the blood and marrow - as a pull to refuge, simplicity, and a safe haven, while at the same time hearing the siren call from the world beyond: the thrilling expectancy of fairground or dancehall, the possibilities of the open road. With a confident open line and complete command of the language, John Burnside writes with grace, agility and profound philosophical purpose, confirming his position in the front rank of contemporary poetry.
  • Published: 15 November 2009
  • ISBN: 9780224090056
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

John Burnside

John Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. He died in 2024.

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 The Asylum Dance

A poet of rare and extraordinary talent

Michael Bracewell, Independent

Lyrical beauty, emotional charge and unforced clarity of form... His poems are acts of revelation

Scotsman

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

Times Literary Supplement

Burnside's vision is of another, sacred, fragile world that co-exists with our own dailiness: his gift is the ability, through poems of a rare and exquisite precision of language, to let his reader glimpse it

Elizabeth Burns, Scotsman

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

Adam Thorpe, Observer