All One Breath

In this absorbing, exciting new collection—his first since Black Cat Bone—John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal world: how we are "all one breath" and—with that breath—how we must strive towards the harmony of choir. Recognizing that our attitudes to other creatures—human and non-human—cause too much damage and hurt, that "we’ve been going at this for years: / a steady delete / of anything that tells us what we are," these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial goodness and beauty into being. He presents the world in a series of still lifes, in tableaux vivants and tableaux morts, in laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a Spiegelkabinett where the reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried truths. All the images are in some sense self-portraits: all are, in some way, elegies. One of the finest and most celebrated lyric poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment—when the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips through the gap in between—and each poem here is a perfect, uncanny hymn to humanity, set down "to tell the lives of others."