Burnside can make even the most mundane scene feel threatening. Oddly tender, for all the terror it evokes, his prose has a seductive depth and clarity that's impossible to resist. . . . "The Glister" is a delight--a scary, fascinating exploration of innocence and evil, and the thin margin that often separates the two--Scott Smith, author of "A ...
In Burnside's first novel since his acclaimed memoir "A Lie About My Father," random acts of cruelty unearth a town's dark secrets, in this spare, bewitching, beautifully written book--("The Times" [London]).
The Baron de Teroze has already successfully married off his eldest daughter to a colonel of the dragoons; now it is time for him to arrange his younger daughter's nuptials. A corrupt magistrate from Aix seems to him the ideal candidate, much to the disgust of the young Mademoiselle de Teroze, who is in love with another man. Vowing to rid the ...
The deeply disturbed narrator creates a twisted variant of the mythical Persian "Gang Mahal" or Dumb House, where babies are raised in silence in order to discover whether language is innate or acquired. His own children succeed in developing a language, for which he extracts an appalling revenge.
He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn't seen his son for years. And for all those years the two estranged men had been falling - each at their own pace - towards their own ...
Moral and legal questions produced by modern developments in medical science. Addresses euthanasia, abortion, in vitro fertilization, health care and distributive justice, truth-telling and informed consent, determination of death, and genetic engineering.
The Mercy Boys are four Dundee men who meet every day at their local pub and drink themselves into temporary oblivion. Junior is a depressive, Sconnie traverses the country on random trains, Alan lives in a kind of dream, and then Rob commits an act of brutal and senseless violence.
To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song's goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to "labour to make the way of God your own", Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to become bamboo. In his tenth ...
Corby, the industrial new town built around a vast steel works, draws many to the fires of its furnaces - in the hope of steady work, a better house, a fresh start. Amongst them are Francis Cameron, from Scotland, and his friend Jan Ruckert, the son of Latvian refugees. Though very different, they are both outsiders; alienated, intelligent and ...
Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in "The Asylum Dance" - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 2000 - 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 - ...
This is about innocence and fear, about boys and men who have no idea who they are or what they are supposed to do, but are haunted by a vague apprehension of possible grace. In their differing ways, they are lost, scared and caught up in a quest, a search for the real "Graceland".
Over seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside has built - in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth and ...
"Goose Music" is a collection of new poems co-authored by Andy Brown and John Burnside, two writers with backgrounds in ecology and notable for their lyric poetry. John Burnside won the Whitbread Prize for poetry in 2000. Characterised by their formal variety, lyric intensity and their attention to natural detail, the poems in "Goose Music" are ...
The term "without day" refers to the "adjournment" of the final sitting of the Scottish Parliament in 1707 to some future but unspecified date, "sine die" - (without day). "Without Day" was an open competition, with information circulated across Scotland and internationally, inviting proposals for artworks, performances and other interventions ...
This collection of poetry is concerned with the place of the individual in the world and the necessary coexistence of the self and the other - with the twin or double. The poems look at the dialogue between the two, and the move from solipsism to a growing sense of community.
Moral and legal questions produced by modern developments in medical science. Addresses euthanasia, abortion, in vitro fertilization, health care and distributive justice, truth-telling and informed consent, determination of death, and genetic engineering.
In 'The Hoop', his first book of poems, John Burnside takes his bearings from Celtic mythology and from landscape, especially that of Gloucestershire. 'The things that contribute to how I work are botanical texts and drawings, fairy stories, Celtic and Romance literature.' The originality of his work lies in its themes - stewardship of the land, a ...
This volume offers a representation of the work of three Scottish poets, John Burnside, Robert Crawford and Kathleen Jamie. The poems where chosen by the poets themselves.
The question of how we live together sits at the heart of this, John Burnside's ninth collection of poetry. Tensions between the need for love and the desire to be alone, between the idea that 'good fences makes good neighbours' and the fact that we must live with one another in order to survive and, most of all, the shifting space between 'self' ...
During the summer of 1975, a rapist stalked the streets of Cambridge, attacking young, single women and subjecting them to horrifying, violent assaults. Over one summer a young photographer is forced to examine his relationship with women as he becomes involved in a series of sexual intrigues.
This collection of poems dealing with childhood, betrayal, and domestic and sexual violence, is described as the poet's darkest and most powerful collection to date. John Burnside was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Prize and the Cosmopolitan Poetry Prize in 1994.
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