John Burnside

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 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.‘A wonderfully disturbing book - chillingly focused and lyrically amoral with moments of remarkable stillness and beauty.’ A.L. Kennedy‘Burnside's prose is exquisite, and he dissects his themes with delicacy to produce a novel resonant with poetic menace’ Sunday Times

Goose Music is a collection of new poems co-authored by Andy Brown and John Burnside, two writers with backgrounds in ecology and notable for their lyric poetry. John Burnside won the Whitbread Prize for poetry in 2000. Characterised by their formal variety, lyric intensity and their attention to natural detail, the poems in Goose Music are Ecopoetic, asking questions of how we might dwell on the earth in these times of great environmental change, exploring lyric ideas of identity, self, myth, landscape and place.

In The Hoop, his first book of poems, John Burnside takes his bearings from Celtic mythology and from landscape, especially that of Gloucestershire. 'The things that contribute to how I work are botanical texts and drawings, fairy stories, Celtic and Romance literature.' The originality of his work lies in its themes - stewardship of the land, a sense that landscape by being described is being valued and preserved - and in his disciplined eye and ear.