Ruin, Blossom: ‘A master of language’ Hilary Mantel

A remarkable new collection from our finest lyric poet and the winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature

‘By far the best British poet alive’ SPECTATOR

‘Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to do’ ALI SMITH, author of Autumn

In this powerful, moving new book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins.

Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty – first sun streaming through the trees – a skylark in the near field, flush with song – as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness.

Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace – numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel’s wing – and the broken tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even with itself: the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but still finds chimes of light in the darkness – insisting that, here and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention, is all Annunciation.

Reviews of Ruin, Blossom: ‘A master of language’ Hilary Mantel

For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive * Spectator * A master of language — Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall The joy of Burnside's poems – and part of what makes them moving – is that he never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living * Observer * Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to do… Convincingly gracious and profoundly necessary — Ali Smith, author of Autumn One of the most gifted poets writing today * Times Literary Supplement *