ED2011 Book Review: Unsettling Poetry And Unforgettable Fiction (John Burnside)

John Burnside’s poetry is concerned with the transient, the fleeting, the “nothingness that haunts being”. His latest collection, ‘Black Cat Bone’, is no exception. Reading a few extracts from this newest work he filled the tent with the wispy fog of words, charming his audience with his invitation to join his world – both robustly natural and affectively ethereal. His newest novel, ‘A Summer of Drowning’, was filled with similar imagery, the bleakness of the Arctic Circle its particular subject. Despite his passionate and personal description of the beauty of that landscape, the brief extract he read made his narrator seem curiously disassociated from reality, as though he were examining the teenage mind through a telescope.

Spiegeltent, 17 Aug, 10.15am (11.15am), £10.00, eibfpp18.
[sj]

Sections: by Samuel Johnston - ED2011 Book Reviews | Tags: Edinburgh International Book Festival, John Burnside

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Friday August 26th, 2011 13:05

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