All One Breath
2014
First Published
4.16
Average Rating
96
Number of Pages
In this absorbing, exciting new collection—his first since Black Cat Bone—John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal how we are "all one breath" and—with that breath—how we must strive towards the harmony of choir. Recognizing that our attitudes to other creatures—human and non-human—cause too much damage and hurt, that "we’ve been going at this for / a steady delete / of anything that tells us what we are," these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial goodness and beauty into being. He presents the world in a series of still lifes, in tableaux vivants and tableaux morts, in laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a Spiegelkabinett where the reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried truths. All the images are in some sense all are, in some way, elegies. One of the finest and most celebrated lyric poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment—when the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips through the gap in between—and each poem here is a perfect, uncanny hymn to humanity, set down "to tell the lives of others."
Avg Rating
4.16
Number of Ratings
110
5 STARS
45%
4 STARS
32%
3 STARS
20%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
John Burnside
Author · 28 books
John Burnside is the author of nine collections of poetry and five works of fiction. Burnside has achieved wide critical acclaim, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes. Born in Scotland, he moved away in 1965, returning to settle there in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. He now lives in Fife with his wife and children and teaches Creative Writing, Literature and Ecology courses at the University of St. Andrews. [Author photo © Norman McBeath]
