Black Cat Bone

Black Cat Bone takes its title from the blues, the hoodoo talisman that is supposed to grant luck in love or make its carrier invisible, and the book inhabits the blues' world completely: night roads, bad love, prodigal returns, a murder ballad's worth of menace, and the loneliness that sits under all of it like a held bass note. John Burnside was by then established as the great contemporary poet of thresholds, the states between waking and sleep, self and other, the domestic and the feral, and these poems push further into the dark than he had gone before, hunters lost in their own hunt, desire curdling toward violence, the self slipping its leash in the hour when nothing is witnessed. What keeps the darkness from monotony is the sensuous precision of the writing, weather, woodsmoke, animal presence, rendered with a naturalist's exactness, and the unresigned longing underneath it, for grace, for a love that would not ruin what it touches; Burnside's bleakness is a believer's bleakness, which is why it lands. The collection won both the Forward Prize and the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize, a same year double only a handful of poets have managed, Ted Hughes among them, and it confirmed Burnside's standing at the very front of British poetry. He had arrived there by an unlikely road, a working class Scottish childhood he anatomized in the memoir A Lie About My Father, years as a software engineer, and a turn to full time writing only in his forties, a life's material the poems transmute rather than report.