Aurochs and Auks is a deeply moving and intelligent meditation on the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and continuity. Prompted by his own near-death in a time of pandemic, John Burnside explores the history of the auroch (Bos primigenius), the wild cattle that has become the source of so much sacred and cultural imagery across Europe, from the Minotaur and the Cretan bull dances to Spanish corrida traditions. He then tells the story of the Great Auk, a curious bird whose extinction in the mid-nineteenth century was caused by human persecution and before stepping into multiple extinctions of the outer and inner world.

A remarkable new collection from our finest lyric poet 'One of the most gifted poets writing today' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR In this powerful, moving new book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognized that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: 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 itself: 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.

In this exquisite, haunting book, John Burnside describes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge. This is a memoir of romance - of lost love and the love of being lost - darkened by threat, illuminated by glamour. The old Scots word 'glamour' means magical charm, and the first time he was played I Put a Spell on You, John Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song - it was an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession. Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him - love, possession and danger - and this book is an exploration of the darker side of glamour and attraction. Beginning with memories of a brutal murder, the book follows the author through a series of uncanny encounters with 'lost girls', with brilliant digressions on murder ballads, voodoo, acid and insomnia, and a cast that includes Kafka and Narcissus, Diane Arbus and Mel Lyman, The Four Tops and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and time spent lost in the Arctic Circle, black-and-white films and a mental institution. Ending with the tender summoning of the ghost of his dying mother as she sings along to the radio in her empty kitchen, I Put a Spell on You is a book about memory, about the other side of love: a book of secrets and wonders.

A young girl, Liv, lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off the shores of Liv's home. Were the deaths accidental or were the boys lured to their doom by a malevolent spirit?

A Financial Times Book of the Year Though we might not realise it, our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the typewriter, ready to distil the essence of the moment, from the muddy wastes of the Western front to the vast reckoning that came with the end of empire. This is the first and only history of twentieth century poetry, by the acclaimed poet, author and academic John Burnside. Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist Russia, 1960's America and Ireland at the height of the Troubles, The Music of Time reveals how poets engaged with and shaped the most important issues of their times - and were in their turn affected by their context and dialogue with each other. This is a major work of scholarship, that on every page bears witness to the transformative beauty and power of poetry.

The sea: turbulent and leaden,transparent and opaque,magician and mother... When Cahrles Arrowby,over sixty,a demi god of the theatre- director,playwright and actor - retires from his glittering London world in order to `abjure magic and become a hermit',it is to the sea that he turns. He hopes at least to escape from `the woman' - but unexpectedly meets one whom he loved long ago. His buddhist cousin, James, also arrives. he is menaced by a monster from the deep. Charlesfinds his `solitude' peopled by the drama of his own fantasies and obsessions.

Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover - or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume. Neither genre nor Granta shall be overlooked in the search for the very best new short fiction. The first book of the series includes stories published in 2010 by the following authors: David Rose, Hilary Mantel, Lee Rourke, Leone Ross, Claire Massey, Christopher Burns, Adam Marek, SJ Butler, Heather Leach, Alan Beard, Kirsty Logan, Philip Langeskov, Bernie McGill, John Burnside, Robert Edric, Michele Roberts, Dai Vaughan, Alison Moore and Salley Vickers.

As a child, Luke's mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language. As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals - tiny hearts revealed still pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the death of his mother, Luke's obsession deepens, resulting in a haunting and bizarre experiment on Luke's own children.

An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller-and to learn how his anarchist sensibility can help us escape "the air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world The American writer Henry Miller's critical reputation--if not his popular readership-has been in eclipse at least since Kate Millett's blistering critique in Sexual Politics, her landmark 1970 study of misogyny in literature and art. Even a Miller fan like the acclaimed Scottish writer John Burnside finds Miller's "sex books"-including The Rosy Crucifixion, Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn-"boring and embarrassing." But Burnside says that Miller's notorious image as a "pornographer and woman hater" has hidden his vital, true importance-his anarchist sensibility and the way it shows us how, by fleeing from conformity of all kinds, we may be able to save ourselves from the "air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world. Miller wrote that "there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy," and in this short, engaging, and personal book, Burnside shows how Miller teaches us to become less adapted to the world, to resist a life sentence to the prison of social, intellectual, emotional, and material conditioning. Exploring the full range of Miller's work, and giving special attention to The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Colossus of Maroussi, Burnside shows how, with humor and wisdom, Miller illuminates the misunderstood tradition of anarchist thought. Along the way, Burnside reflects on Rimbaud's enormous influence on Miller, as well as on how Rimbaud and Miller have influenced his own writing. An unconventional and appealing account of an unjustly neglected writer, On Henry Miller restores to us a figure whose searing criticism of the modern world has never been more relevant.

In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment; all kinds of women, all kinds of men - lonely, unfaithful, dying - driving empty roads at night. These are people for whom the idea of 'home' has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe - and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children's picture book. As he says in one story, 'All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.' But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending. John Burnside is unique in contemporary British letters: he is one of our best living poets, but he is also a thrillingly talented writer of fiction. These exquisitely written pieces, each weighted so perfectly, opens up the whole wound of a life in one moment - and each of these twelve short stories carries the freight and density of a great novel.

Lucid, lyrical and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with real life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness. Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, John Burnside's first collection of poetry in four years - from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence. 'For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator ** A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**

Apostasy is a remarkable new collection of fourteen poems by John Burnside, one of the UK's foremost poets. A child struggles to reconcile a received Catholic world-view with a more instinctive and passionate paganism. A deep connection with the natural world offers an imaginative and spiritual freedom.

Although mostly concealed, our bedrock geology profoundly determines what we see around us - not just our landforms, but the built environment too, from Aberdeen, often called the "granite city" to Bath, constructed from honey-coloured limestone- rocks shape the world around us. In Cornerstones, some of Britain's leading landscape and nature writers consider their relationship with the ground beneath their feet. Distinguished by a strong sense of place and close observation, these essays take the reader out into the landscape and convey the tactile heft, grain and rub of the rock, showing how it shapes our familiar landscapes. Adapted from the successful BBC Radio Three series, Cornerstones explores how different rock types give rise to their own distinct flora and fauna, and even affect the food we eat.

Kate, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. Jean declines, but makes her a bizarre counter-offer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. If she can stay sober beyond that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to the entire history of one family's life. Gradually, Jean offers a heart-breaking account, not only of her own history - a lost lover, a family scarred by war - but of the American century itself; as a deep connection emerges between the women which will transform both of their lives.

Since George Lister's chemical plant closed down, Innertown has been a shadow of its former self. In the woods that once teemed with life, strange sickly plants grow. Homes that were once happy are threatened by a mysterious illness.
Here, a young boy named Leonard and his friends exist in a state of confusion and despair, as every year or so a boy from their school vanishes after venturing into the poisoned woods. Without conclusive evidence of foul play, the authorities consider the boys to be runaways.
The town policeman suspects otherwise but, paralyzed with fear, he does nothing. And so it is up to the children who remain to take action. Their plan to stop the forces of evil that are destroying their town is at the shocking and terrifying heart of "The Glister."

Goose Music is a collection of new poems co-authored by Andy Brown and John Burnside, two writers with backgrounds in ecology and notable for their lyric poetry. John Burnside won the Whitbread Prize for poetry in 2000. Characterised by their formal variety, lyric intensity and their attention to natural detail, the poems in Goose Music are Ecopoetic, asking questions of how we might dwell on the earth in these times of great environmental change, exploring lyric ideas of identity, self, myth, landscape and place.

Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in The Asylum Dance - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry - are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is territory that Burnside has made his own: a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no man's land - the 'somewhere in between' - of dusk or dawn, of mists or sudden light, where the epiphanies are. Using the framework of four long poems, 'Ports', 'Settlements', 'Fields' and 'Roads', the poet balances presence with absence; we are shown the homing instinct - felt in the blood and marrow - as a pull to refuge, simplicity, and a safe haven, while at the same time hearing the siren call from the world beyond: the thrilling expectancy of fairground or dancehall, the possibilities of the open road. With a confident open line and complete command of the language, John Burnside writes with grace, agility and profound philosophical purpose, confirming his position in the front rank of contemporary poetry.