The posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets, a powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty.
''A master of language'' HILARY MANTEL
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.
''Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched… He now leaves behind a body of work that will only grow stronger as new generations discover it’ ANDREW O''HAGAN
‘A titan of literature…. His passing leaves a gap not only in our literature, but in our ability to exist in the world. He increased the possible ways of our being'' KATHLEEN JAMIE