Black Cat Bone opens with ‘The Fair Chase’, an 11-page poem concerning a hunter pursuing an unnamed quarry. Beginning with a long piece such as this is a risky gambit, with most contemporary poets tending to place them near the end of a book. This gives them the chance to win the reader’s trust and confidence, before leading them on an extended journey. This being John Burnside’s twelfth collection, he has perhaps built up a solid enough reputation to dispense with this precaution. Reading ‘The Fair Chase’ it is hard not to place Burnside himself in the position of the hunter, so frequently do his poems seek to pin down something unnamed and mysterious. It has been a career-length pursuit and he is without equal when it comes to connecting us with mysterious, liminal landscapes. The first lines of this opening poem place us straight in classic Burnside territory:

What we were after there, in the horn and vellum
shadows of the wood behind our house,
I never knew.

‘Shadows’ and ‘wood’, and later in the book ‘water’, ‘wind’, ‘gloaming’, ‘ice’. Words of change, foggy boundaries and transitional things, are so important in Burnside’s work that they take on talismanic qualities, denoting far more than their real-world counterparts, summoning places of suggestion where the mystic moves easily amongst us, “glimpsed, / but never really seen.” (‘Loved and Lost’), and “darkness folds and blisters into foreign // bodies.” (‘The Nightingale’) This talismanic quality to Burnside is explicitly evoked in the title of this collection: a ‘black cat bone’ is a charm used by practitioners of African American magic, in which tradition it is provides a positive influence. Burnside explores the darker connotations implicit in any magic, with death and darkness stalking through the book with undiminished power, as they have done since the stark mythologising of his debut collection, The Hoop.

That said, some of the poems in this collection do connect with a more recognisable world, such as ‘Notes Towards an Ending’ in which “that feathered thing we brought in from the yard” serves as a metaphor for a marriage that, like the rescued bird, the couple have “tried and failed to mend”. This turning towards the actual suggests a promising new avenue for Burnside’s writing which, while never predictable, has certainly mined a similar vein for a number of years. In short, seasoned readers of his will find little here that is new, but even after a dozen books Burnside still has the power to capture the imagination like no-one else.

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