Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for poetry, John Burnside's Black Cat Bone was lauded upon its publication in Britain in 2011. Four years later, Graywolf Press has brought this powerful collection of poems across the Atlantic, and it is well worth the wait.
In four sections, Burnside ruminates on the natural world, aging and the end of a marriage (perhaps the poet's own, though it's never clear). The language is quiet, as if the speaker is always removed from his feelings, or looking into a memory, even when describing acts of infidelity or lust (lines like "She's in an attic room/ with someone else,/ hands in her skirt and that/ dove sound caught in her throat" from "Moon Going Down" are elegiac as they portray betrayal). In many of the pieces, the landscape is covered in snow, and one can guess Burnside is usually trying to match the stillness of winter with his words. Even when the poems become fantastical, like the opening "The Fair Chase," where a fairy tale of a man tracks an animal that's "not quite discernible: a mouth, then eyes,/ then nothing," his voice and style remain firm, showing his complete control of language.
If there is anything to complain about in Black Cat Bone, it would be the repetition of images, though one cannot fault an artist for depicting certain aspects of life in variation, and this is apparent only when all the poems are read in a short period of time. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.