9 Poems: Celebrating the winner of the T.S. Eliot prize - John Burnside

Next meet up - Thursday 26th January 2012 at 6.30pm @ Six-Eight Kafe 

The poems we will be reading and discussing are all taken from the winning book of poems: Black Cat Bone* published by Jonathan Cape. This book also won the prestigious 2011 Forward Prize. 

"Accessible, memorable and often strikingly beautiful...Burnside is renowned for haunting imagery, but it's impeccable musical judgement that binds his lyrics together."

                                                          Fiona Sampson, Independent

1. On The Fairytale Ending
2. Loved and Lost
3. Hurts Me Too
4. A Game Of Marbles
5.Bird Nest Bound
6.Hyena
7. Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape With Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565
8. Late Show
9.From The Chinese


* Black cat bone: A powerful hoodoo talisman, conferring success, invisibility and sexual power on its owner. It is highly prized because of the elaborate and dangerous nature of the rite by which it is obtained; cf Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men for a vivid account of the ritual.

John Burnside: Winner of TS Eliot Prize

"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.

Click on the link:
John Burnside

T.S. Eliot Prize readings - the Southbank Sunday 15th January 2012

The shortlisted poets read from their collections on the eve of the judges’ decision on the winner. The judging panel this year, chaired by Gillian Clarke with Stephen Knight and Dennis O’Driscoll, have a strong shortlist to choose from, and this event is a unique opportunity to hear the very best contemporary poets reading from their work.

I was fortunate to attend the evening and particularly enjoyed John Burnside but for those of you who couldn't make it you can click on this link to hear: John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Leontia Flynn, David Harsent, Esther Morgan, Daljit Nagra, Sean O’Brien and Bernard O’Donoghue. Enjoy!


Audio Recording of the evening Part 1


Audio Recording of the evening Part 2