John Burnside

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets John Burnside's last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme - mortality - and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with death, creating a powerfully moving exploration of memory, forgetting and the seven ages. Here, as always, there is a clear-eyed curiosity; a sense of wonder at the beleaguered natural world and its endless mutability - its hidden beauty, often suddenly disclosed - and a deep faith in its old gods. Burnside was always as much a spirit-guide as a poet, and here, in the Empire of Forgetting, we are never far from a fresh alertness to the world, to epiphany - a sudden, spiritual manifestation. There is a sense, too, in these last poems, of a man having found a 'dwelling place' - a sense of rest and peace and settlement with the world. A state of grace.

Though we might not realise it, our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the typewriter, ready to distil the essence of the moment, from the muddy wastes of the Western front to the vast reckoning that came with the end of empire. This is the first and only history of twentieth century poetry, by the acclaimed poet, author and academic John Burnside. Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist Russia, 1960's America and Ireland at the height of the Troubles, The Music of Time reveals how poets engaged with and shaped the most important issues of their times - and were in their turn affected by their context and dialogue with each other. This is a major work of scholarship, that on every page bears witness to the transformative beauty and power of poetry.

Dielo Františka Saleského Návod na nábožný život už vyše štyristo rokov slúži ako príručka na živšie a autentickejšie kráčanie v Ježišových šľapajach. Otec Burns mu teraz v knihe Skroť svoje nepokojné srdce dáva nový šat. Zrozumiteľným a pritom moderným jazykom tlmočí meditácie svätca a pozýva nás vydať sa na desaťdňovú duchovnú púť. Počas nej nás chce po boku Františka Saleského, Panny Márie i anjela strážcu podnietiť k aktívnej snahe o svätosť a nábožnosť. Na začiatku je nutné pripustiť si všetky limity a obmedzenia a prosiť Boha o pomoc a posilu. Potom sa môžeme vydať do ťažšieho terénu tém, ako je smrť, súd, nebeská blaženosť verzus večný zármutok. V priebehu putovania sa naučíme rozlišovať dobro a zlo, nanovo si usporiadame svoje hodnoty, aby lepšie odzrkadľovali našu lásku k Bohu i blížnym. Osvojíme si postoj vďačnosti a pochopíme, že sme závislí od Boha. Napokon preniknutí krásou nebeského raja, zatúžime konať tak, ako konal Ježiš. Tak teda neváhajme, naštartujme alebo reštartujme svoj duchovný život a vyjdime v ústrety nebu už tu na zemi. Kniha je cirkevne schválená.

From our earliest childhood experiences, we learn to see the world as contested space: a battleground between received ideas, entrenched conventions and myriad Authorised Versions on the one hand, and new discoveries, terrible dangers, and everyday miracles on the other. As we grow, that world expands further, to include new species, lost continents, the realm of the dead and the lives of others: cosmonauts swim in distant space, unseen creatures pass through a garden at dusk; we are surrounded by delectable mysteries. The question of this contested, liminal world sits at the centre of Still Life with Feeding Snake, whose poems live at the edge of loss, or on the cusp of epiphany, always seeking that brief instant of grace when we see what is before us, and not just what we expected to find. In 'Approaching Sixty', the poet watches as a woman unclasps her hair: 'so the nape of her neck/is visible, slender and pale/for moments, before the spill/of light and russet/falls down to her waist'. This, like each poem in the book, becomes an essay in still life and a memento mori, illuminating transient experience with a profound clarity and a charged, sensual beauty.

As a child, Luke's mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language. As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals - tiny hearts revealed still pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the death of his mother, Luke's obsession deepens, resulting in a haunting and bizarre experiment on Luke's own children.