Black Cat Bone: Poems

The prolific Scottish poet, novelist, and memoirist (A Summer of Drowning) has such a high profile in the U.K. that it’s a shock to realize this volume—his 14th collection in Britain—is his first set of poems to be published here. With his mellifluous pentameters, attention to the immaterial, and his turning aside from the ultramodern (though he remains modern), we might call Burnside Heaneyesque, though he is also Gothic, mythic, and almost (delightfully) morbid—seeing death, or the dead, or bad omens, almost everywhere. “We live in peril, die from happenstance,” he muses, “a casual slip, a fault line in the ice,” though the skaters in this poem survive. Burnside’s gift for narrative serves him in the quest that opens the volume, in which a man seeks “the curious/ pleasure of the doomed.” Burnside’s children, like his adults, are haunted, trailed by “a ghost in the undergrowth” and flanked by trappings of a religion that can express grief but cannot prevent it. “The things I love/ I bury in the woods/ to keep them safe.” Readers of Burnside’s memoirs will link the man’s rough, unreliable upbringing, with an alcoholic fabulist father, to his unforgiving, unchanging spirit world; other readers might just lose themselves in the language, as if under a predator’s ominous spell. [em](July) [/em]