I picked up a copy of John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone because it’s referred to in Pat Collins’s film Silence, and I was curious. Even though he published five novels, seventeen books of poetry, and three works of nonfiction, our library has nothing by him. Perhaps he’s not well known, despite having won many prizes, including the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award. I loved this book, though, and I’m not sorry to have it in my collection.

There’s no wifi on this flight, so I was unable to translate the many quotations here (in German, Italian, and French), or check a dictionary for definitions of the often abstruse, archaic vocabulary. That’s fine, because it forced me to focus on the sound of the poems and their surprising images. I’ll admit that I don’t know what’s happening in at least half of the poems here, and that doesn’t matter. The multiple languages point to the importance of sound as much as sense, and I didn’t sense that Burnside was showing off his erudition. 

I couldn’t even be certain where the poems are situated. Some refer to North American things (cottonwoods, lodgepole pines), others to things I associate with Scotland (hedgehogs, kirks). The latter isn’t surprising, since Burnside taught at the University of St. Andrews until he died two years ago. Even the time when the poems are set isn’t always clear. The long poem that begins the book, “The Fair Chase,” for instance, seems to be set in the quasi-medieval world of some fantasy writing, except for the presence of firearms and the words “rotting tyres.” Those details don’t matter as much as the repeated figures and themes: lost love, death, mysterious shadows doubling the poems’ speakers, snow and winter. The book works by feeling rather than facts. I like that, selfishly, because I need more of it in my own writing.

I loved this, so much that I don’t completely trust my judgment. Perhaps a poet friend will let me know whether Burnside is as good as I think he is.