Black Cat Bone

Winner of both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, Black Cat Bone is the first American publication of the poetry of John BurnsideBefore the songs I sang there were the songsthey came from, patent shredsof Babel, and the secretNineveh of back rooms in the dark.Hour after hourthe night trains blundered throughfrom towns so far away and innocentthat everything I knew seemed fictional: -from 'Death Room Blues'John Burnside's Black Cat Bone is full of poems of thwarted love and disappointment, raw desire, the stalking beast. One sequence tells of an obsessive lover coming to grief in echoes of the old murder ballads, and another longer poem describes a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Black Cat Bone introduces American readers to one of the best poets writing across the Atlantic.