Still Life with Feeding Snake

Burnside can describe the material world with astonishing deftness... but here, as so often in his writing, the observable facts undergo a series of transformations: into a meditation on separateness, from this to the end of a relationship, and then on to the nature of our eat-or-be-eaten world... Musical and memorable, this is echt Burnside. He is the poet who more than any other writing today sees the material world and the world of thought and ideas as two sides of the most fragile of membranes. Few could make the colour blue such a sensuous symbol of slippages of atmosphere or mood... Still Life teems with the variety of the world... If you have hitherto admired John Burnside in only one genre, now is the time to take the smallest of sideways steps and read both. Fiona Sampson New Statesman