Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for
Best Collection 'There are lines in All One Breath for instance,
that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful
recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert
to beauty, too.' - Sebastian Barry, a New Statesman Book of the
Year In this absorbing, brilliant new collection - his first since
Black Cat Bone - John Burnside examines our shared experience of
this mortal world: how we are 'all one breath' and - with that
breath - how we must strive towards the harmony of choir.
Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures - human and
non-human - cause too much damage and hurt, that 'we've been going
at this for years: / 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 self-portraits: 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'.
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