Black Cat Bone
Title:
Black Cat Bone Poems
| Price | $16.00 |
- Paperback
“[Burnside] offers fabulist poems in lush, sometimes archaic language that’s meant to unsettle, even as it explores our most unsettled feelings.”—Library Journal, starred review
“Burnside imbues his verse with the enchanted landscapes of his Scottish origins. . . . A magical, lyrical imagining that expertly blends universal desire and distinct locale.”—Booklist
About the Book
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 songs
they came from, patent shreds
of Babel, and the secret
Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.
Hour after hour
the night trains blundered through
from towns so far away and innocent
that everything I knew seemed fictional:
—from “Death Room Blues”
they came from, patent shreds
of Babel, and the secret
Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.
Hour after hour
the night trains blundered through
from towns so far away and innocent
that everything I knew seemed fictional:
—from “Death Room Blues”
John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone is full of poems of thwarted love and disappointment, raw desire, the stalking beast. One sequence tells of an obsessive lover coming to grief in echoes of the old murder ballads, and another longer poem describes a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Black Cat Bone introduces American readers to one of the best poets writing across the Atlantic.
Additional Reviews
“Ranks among the best of the decade.” —Flavorwire
“The unique timbre created by Burnside’s ingenious prosody and obsessive imagination make for poetry of a very high order.”—The Rumpus
“Readers might just lose themselves in the language, as if under a predator’s ominous spell.”—Publishers Weekly
Join Today
Graywolf Press is a community of authors, editors, readers, and donors who are brought together by a shared love of great books and a belief that diverse voices and opinions need to be represented in the world of letters.
