Gift Songs

ISBN-13: 9780224079976 / Angielski / Miękka / 2007 / 112 str.

John Burnside

Opis

To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song s goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to "labour to make the way of God your own," Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to "become" bamboo. In his 10th collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a free churchwhere faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the indefinableand moves on through explorations of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic "re-ligere," the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world. The book closes with a series of meditations on place, entitled "Four Quartets," intended both as a spiritual response to the string quartets of Bartok and Britten (as Eliot s were to Beethoven s late quartets), and as an experiment in the poetic form that the finest of poets, the true "miglior fabbro," chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in this collection are true gifts: thrillingly beautiful, charged with power and mystery, each imbued with the generous skills of a master of his craft."

Recenzje

If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present, I feel it is here, in Burnside's singular music Adam Thorpe Observer

O autorze

John Burnside is amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Petrarca Prize and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011, Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. His most recent books are The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction. He is a professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.