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 Burnside

Before the songs I sang there were the songs

they came from, patent shreds

of Babel, and the secret

Nineveh of back rooms in the dark.



Hour after hour

the night trains blundered through

from towns so far away and innocent

that 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.