Bøger af John Burnside

In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, the author resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a 'Surbiton of the mind'. This title tells is an account of a troubled childhood.

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 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.

John Burnside ist ein Meister des unscheinbaren Augenblicks, in dem sich das abgründige Wesen der Dinge offenbart. Ob es die verstörende Betrachtung der Leiche eines Kojoten am Wegrand ist oder der Besuch des Berliner Spiegelkabinetts mit seinem Sohn, in dem das Ich plötzlich als schwindende, groteske Figur erscheint. Aber dann kann es auch sein, dass ein fliehender Hase, der über die großen Felder wegflitzt, den Dichter "sprachlos lässt, offen für Neues". Burnside weiß: Was uns von den Dingen trennt, ist auch jenes "Leben, das niemals uns allein gehört, / das uns einschließt, bis alles / Chor ist".

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**

"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"--Amazon.com.

A profound, mysterious, deeply moving novel - a meeting of love and grief, like water on arid soil - Ashland & Vine is the story of an unlikely friendship that transcends time, age and the limits of narrative to reveal the unexpected grace that comes of listening to another's history, while telling, as carefully as we can, what we know of our own.

In Persian myth, it is said that Akbar the Great once built a palace which he filled with newborn children, attended only by mutes, in order to learn whether language is innate or aquired.

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.

Once, on a winter's night many years ago, after a heavy snow, the devil passed through the Scottish fishing town of Coldhaven, leaving a trail of dark hoofprints across the streets and roofs of the sleeping town.

This pocket-sized paperback is one of the twenty-four titles published for 2017 Hong Kong International Poetry Nights. IPNHK is one of the most influential international poetry events in Asia. These unique works are presented with Chinese and English translations in bilingual or trilingual formats.

John Burnside's examination of place and utopia set on the remote island of Havergey.

Beginning with memories of a brutal murder, this book takes you through a series of uncanny encounters with 'lost girls', with brilliant digressions on murder ballads, voodoo, acid and insomnia.

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.

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 or 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.

Drawing on various sources, this book examines varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find - in the forest or in our own hearts - ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually there.

A young girl, Liv, lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. 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?

Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence the authorities claim they are simply runaways. He was involved in the cover-up of one boy's murder, and he believes all the boys have been killed.

Contains a collection of poems of John Burnside.