Product Description

Lucid, tender and strangely troubing, the poems in Burnside's seventh collection are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #407515 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 100 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The poet and novelist John Burnside opens his seventh collection of verse The Asylum Dance with epigrams from Heidegger and Marianne Moore: Heidegger's meditation on the nature of "dwelling" being answered by Moore's absolute faith in the truth of art. At the outset, then, a dialogue between philosophy and poetry is located as the lodestar of Burnside's work, an insistent and careful scrutiny of familiar, taken-for-granted ideas pursued through the contingently truthful medium of the poem, all of which exemplifies a desire to find "The angel bound / and stilled / in Euclid or Fibonacci." His skilfully modulated verbal art thus balances the tension between abstract speculation and sensuous, closely observed detail: "When we think of home / we come to this / the handful of birds and plants we know by name / rain on the fishmonger's window."

Burnside's themes are ones that are common to us all--the sure sanctuary of home, the human in relation to the natural world, the tensions between the domestic, familiar world and the strange invitations of travel and immersion in unfamiliar surroundings and the spaces we find or create for love and the imagination. The opening long poem "Ports" starts with the words "Our dwelling place"-and Burnside returns again and again to the idea of home and dwelling throughout this book, widening out the circle of his meditations on what these might mean to us. If the poet's "body is wired / to the flavours / of childhood," he nonetheless realises that "what we think of as home / is a hazard to others." But even our securities are tentative: a shift of perspective and home becomes "a different country," our bodies "half-inhabited"-behind the safety of the known environment lies the possibility of other ways of being and perceiving.

It is this acceptance of the contradictory impulses of the "known world" and "the pull of the withheld / the foreign joy" that animates and drives Burnside's work, and which is expressed through a flexible open verse form perfectly adapted both to the registering of image and to fleeting turns of thought. What results is a poetry that is striking in its immediate pleasures and which stays long in the memory: something we can indeed "use to make a dwelling in the world." --Burhan Tufail

Review
"If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry--it is here, in Burnside's singular music." - "Observer"

Customer Reviews

Good!
This book was a challenging read, but I enjoyed it. Some of the poetry was hard to understand and I had to read it a few times over, but it soon became clearer. I especially like the language that Burnside uses. I would recommend this book to any poetry reader.

Astonishing book!
I happenned to browse through this book in a shop a few months ago, and was struck by the first page, so I went and borrowed a copy from the local library. This book lived up to the expectation that that first page created in me. These poems are about home, how we define where we live, what it is home? they are about the tension between wanting to belong, to settle and the urge of the open road, fairgrounds, dance halls. They are profound, moving, thoughtful, beautiful, and they strike a chord within that is very real. The Asylum Dance won huge critical acclaim, and, reading it, I can see why.

Mental Reveille
The good reader from Oldham gives 'Asylum Dance' 4 stars, I'll give it 5, with pleasure. This is beautifully crafted poetry designed to keep the reader's intellect on the boil. And as with Eliot's poetry, it is not vital to understand it all on first or second reading as the imagery and the lyricism enthrall and delight.Burnside's tensions are deliciously balanced.