John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone

(Credit: Graham Clark)

(Author: Amanda Claire Eades)

A ‘black cat bone’ – a type of lucky charm used in the magical tradition of hoodoo to confer good luck, invisibility and romantic success (among other positive effects) on the recipient – gives us the title of this most recent collection from John Burnside, published by Cape in 2011. Winner of the Forward Poetry Prize 2011 for Best Collection, it is easy to see why, on the whole, this collection has wooed so many critics.

It is not just the poetic ‘charm’ of the creations that lie within these pages that impress. Burnside’s writing is wholly fluid whilst having an innate solidity and purpose. Sometimes dream-like, insubstantial and unequivocally liminal these poems somehow leave a tangible presence so acute in both description and delivery that it leaves an impression on the mind, perfectly described by Burnside in ‘Insomnia in Southern Illinois’: ‘there’s a gap on the stairs / where something is gone: say a grandfather clock, or a previous householder, wandering back / to the life he had here’ (63).

Broken down into four sections – ‘The Fair Chase’, ‘Everafter’, ’Black Cat Bone’ and ‘Faith’, this collection is a mix of many styles and themes – love, disappointment, desire, the hunter, obsession, to name but a few – it does not surprise me that some sections fair better than others. ‘Black Cat Bone’, the titular section and as such the presupposed centre of gravity for the collection, is weaker than the others. I would have to agree with The Guardian’s M. Wynn Thomas, and suggest that Burnside seems to wane a little when he engages with the noir, or macabre.

Beginning with ‘Nativity’, a grisly poem in which a new-born lies ‘squalling in a slick of blood’ (29) amidst curses, the fading warmth of a mother figure and eerie candelight, ‘Nativity’ does not hold the gravity that the title would suggest. ‘Hurts Me Too’, the poem that holds the title of this collection in its opening stanza is surprisingly empty and unfulfilling for a poem about ‘love’ and a ‘the black cat bone / she buries in a kiss … sweeter now / than honey from the book of Genesis’ (33). I wanted this poem to end with a sense of fulfilment, as the speaker ‘drinks in’ his love as ‘she comes, now, now, stealing across the fields’ (33) – instead I am left more in agreement with the title when I read this poem from a critical point of view. The honey of the first stanza leaves a sickly sweetness, whilst the weight of the poem ‘curdles’ (33) under an unimpressive and unconvincing vampire-esque ending.

I accept that I am making this collection sound like a failure: rest assured, for all the let-downs this collection has, they are in a ratio of 1:10 with moments of pure poetic excellence. On the whole, the poems in this collection hang in the memory – even with the disappointment of the titular section, Burnside still approaches his own macabre writing with such confidence it is hard to forget, even if the poems do not fulfil ones’ own personal expectations. (‘Transfiguration’ is a particularly good example of a poem that carries a ‘dark’ central image through the form of the sonnet, rather successfully).

On the whole, clarity and precision are the hallmarks of Burnside’s work, without making any of the poems seem formal or staid. ‘Faith’, the collection’s last section, is a masterpiece of observation, emotion and consideration. ‘Amnesia’ uses snow to visualise the blank cover of amnesia that lies over the landscape of consciousness:

I forget
what I wanted to see
from my kitchen door
and watch the new snow
falling in the yard,
precise
and random
like an early film,
whiting the corners
first
then the spars
of the gate
erasing the path
by degrees
and blanking out
the post-and-wire
along our boundary
till everything
is one
wide
incognito (54)

Snow is again appropriated as a useful device for visualising the frustration of the mind in ‘Insomnia in Southern Illinois’, where ‘Out in the dark, over the snow, / a barred owl flits / through the cottonwoods, slow / and far in the distance, no matter how close’ (63). The poem is full of images of grandfather clocks, porch lights and “the tracks of the mule deer [that] come and go, / though nothing is there when I go to look” (63) that are at once solid, and then snatched from the poem, perfectly imagining the snatching of sleep that the sufferer of insomnia is well versed in.

The poem ‘From the Chinese’ that ends the collection with the ‘potential’ to be persuaded (66)and an openness and a sense of something ‘arriving’ wonderfully mirrors the opening section of Black Cat Bone, ‘The Fair Chase’. The hunt for the unknown beast is never really begun, and never really finished. The poem begins:

What we were after there, in the horn and vellum
shadows of the wood behind our house,
I never knew. (3)

The body of this ninety-stanza long poem is more focused on the hunter than the hunted, who loses himself in the woods. The hunt becomes a hunt for himself as he ‘walked off to one side, and halfway through the white of afternoon, / I slipped away, unwanted, or unnoticed, / taking a road less-travelled through fields and yards …’ (5). The animal – ‘a deer, I thought … a fox’ (7) is shot, and all that remains of ‘something I could never name’ (8)

… was an inkwash of blear in the grass
Like the fogged stain after a thaw,
and a ribbon of musk

threading away to the trees
and the distance beyond:
no body, no warmth, no aftermath, nothing to prize” (9)

‘The Fair Chase’ is one of Burnside’s most impressive poems that balance between the heat of the chase and the embrace of the night ‘like a weight at my shoulders, / settling in waves, till all I could see was my hands’ (9).  The unknowable quarry enables this poem to float in poetic purgatory, a liminal poem that is never really begun, or finished, in any concrete way. There is a sense of awe throughout this sequence, not just at the unrelenting chase of the hunter, but also for Burnside, who achieves this through three-line stanzas that never falter or wane through the eleven pages of what is, essentially, a failure to achieve the purpose of the hunt. ‘The Fair Chase’ is a perfect way to open a collection that brings so many themes to the table. The reader is at once opened to the sense of inconclusiveness in the poems that follow, and so acclimatised to Burnside’s constant search for something that rarely materialises – missing grandfather clocks, vanishing deer tracks and ‘the tinnitus of longing’ (19) – but is, as becomes clear, the only thing that is really ‘there’, albeit fleetingly.

Black Cat Bone is a huge achievement, a successful blending of many themes and sources that are delivered with the same unmistakable Burnside confidence and elegance. The untouchable becomes crystallised, and the reachable becomes shaken beyond perception, to make for an engrossing collection that does not fail to impress and awaken the reader. For a collection that calls on the magical tradition of hoodoo for its title, there is no ‘luck’ in Black Cat Bone – this is a collection of poems from one of the best living lyrics poets I have ever read: a testament to achievement in and dedication to poetry.

Sources:

¹ Burnside, John. Black Cat Bone. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011. Print.

² Thomas, M. Wynn. ‘Black Cat Bone by John Burnside – review’ guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 September 2011. Accessed 03/01/2012.