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 we grow, that world expands further, to include new species, lost continents, the realm of the dead and the lives of others- cosmonauts swim in distant space, unseen creatures pass through a garden at dusk; we are surrounded by delectable mysteries. The question of this contested, liminal world sits at the centre of Still Life with Feeding Snake, whose poems live at the edge of loss, or on the cusp of epiphany, always seeking that brief instant of grace when we see what is before us, and not just what we expected to find. In 'Approaching Sixty', the poet watches as a woman unclasps her hair- 'so the nape of her neck/is visible, slender and pale/for moments, before the spill/of light and russet/falls down to her waist'. This, like each poem in the book, becomes an essay in still life and a memento mori, illuminating transient experience with a profound clarity and a charged, sensual beauty.
About the Author
John Burnside has published in the UK five works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry, including The Asylum Dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Light Trap, which was short-listed for the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize. His memoir, A Lie About My Father, was published in 2006 in the UK to enormous critical acclaim.
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