"John Burnside's victory with his 11th collection of poetry Black Cat Bone came on the back of an enormously successful 2011 in which he won five literary recognitions including a Costa Book Award nomination (for his novel A Summer Of Drowning) and the Forward Prize for Black Cat Bone - a dark, brooding collection in which mankind's only solace from a cruel world of ice and blood and angry gods is each other. The 56-year-old's acceptance speech was delivered in the form, fittingly, of a poem called Loved And Lost."
Loved and Lost
- John Burnside
Give me a childhood again and I will live
as owls do, in the moss and curvature
of nightfall
-glimpsed,
but never really seen,
tracking the lane
to a house I have known from birth
through goldenrod
and alstroemeria;
while somewhere,
at the far edge of the day,
a pintailed duck
is calling to itself
across a lake,
the answer it receives
no more or less remote than we become
to one another,
mapped,
then set aside 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.
Nativity by John Burnside
I come by chance. A train slows in the fog
and stands a while
and, when it leaves, there's one more soul aboard,
sung from the quiet, passing from car to car,
like the angel of God;
or, north of here, in some old lumber town,
the church clock stops, the wind dies in the trees
and I lie squalling in a slick of blood
and moonlight, seventh son
to some man's seventh son.
No gifts for me, no angel in the rafters
caught like a bird in the updraft from the stove,
only the words of an old curse scratched on the wall,
and the warmth of my mother
fading, as lights go out
in house after house, from here
to the edge of the world,
her slack mouth, then the darkness in her eyes
the first thing I see
when the midwife returns with a candle.
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John Burnside
