John Burnside - Black Cat Bone

John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry)

It's still 2011 on this website. With this book winning both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes I thought it ought to be looked at. I'm very glad I did. It is an excellent book and a not unworthy winner of the double.

In many ways one can bracket it with the Harsent and O'Brien collections of last year, as part of a middle-aged man syndrome of poetry haunted by loss or demons and darkness. But in the same way that Bach, Handel and, say, Telemann might sound very similar to the uninitiated, attentive listening can differentiate them. Here one might find more possibility or suggestion of redemption in Burnside than O'Brien's unreconciled sense of loss or Harsent's dark side.

The opening poem, The Fair Chase, is full of absence and searching but at least feels an,

infinite kinship, laid down in the blood

against the sway

of accident and weather

It introduces some of the recurrent images in the collection- vellum, billhooks and ice, for examples. 'Vellum' in the first line here is an adjective, suggesting a richness that 'medieval' in On the Fairytale Ending also does, redolent of heraldry and pageantry in,

broken gold

and crimson in the medieval

beechwoods

The collection maintains a steady, measured rhythm and glorious texture throughout. It's not difficult to see how it appealed to two different sets of prize judges.

'Hooks and eyes' recur as a metaphor as tiny binding forces in a world knitted intricately together but with its griefs and breakage a part of it, too.

Loved and Lost is a surprisingly literal title to an outstanding poem among several that is otherwise more allusive, ending brilliantly,

till we admit

that love divulged is barely love at all:

only the slow decay of a second skin

concocted from the tinnitus of longing.

If poetry often takes much of its power from the ability to imply meaning from contradictory ideas, Burnside makes impressive work of sustaining and resilience from the fragility of being and the inevitability of loss.

Another disconcerting title, Oh No, Not My Baby, knowingly lifted from the Goffin and King standard pop song, has not the potency of such relatively cheap music but the loving and moving sincerity of something more profound done with disarming fluency.

Neoclassical might be where we think we are reading Sean O'Brien except that closer reading finds a somewhat gentler mood in it somewhere, just fractionally, in the accumulation of something like acceptance or not quite acquiescence but not resistance either.

This is a beautiful book, fully deserving of its awards and I have to urge you to read it as a paragon example of what is best about poetry at the moment. 2011 produced some very fine books of poems. I won't revise my choice of the Harsent as being my favourite but the selection would have been even more difficult to make if I had read this book in time. I don't know what 2012 has in store - I believe we are promised the Collected O'Brien which will be a useful career restrospective- but when I notice this year getting underway, I'll let you know.