Ruin, Blossom
2024
First Published
3.78
Average Rating
73
Number of Pages
A remarkable new collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction - from our finest Scottish lyric poet****WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023****'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR'A master of language' HILARY MANTELIn this powerful, moving new book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins.Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty – first sun streaming through the trees … a skylark in the near field, flush with song – as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness.Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace – numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel’s wing – and the broken tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even with the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but still finds chimes of light in the darkness – insisting that, here and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention, is all Annunciation.
Avg Rating
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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]
