John Burnside

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Swimming In The Flood

A breakthrough book of poetry by one of the most exciting young poets in Britain. Dealing with issues of childhood, betrayal and domestic and sexual violence, SWIMMING IN THE FLOOD is Burnside's darkest and most powerful collection yet.

The latest collection by one of Britain's finest, and most successful, young poets

In his fifth collection, John Burnside has peopled his mysterious, mythical world with lost and damaged souls. The title poem portrays a solitary swimmer, captured by a news camera at the moment when his community and possessions have been swept away in a flood. Elsewhere in these uncompromising and passionate poems we meet characters in similar predicaments who, in the midst of their pain, find ways of being healed - of working towards a form of recovery, represented here in the recurring images of renewal and resurrection, and the idea of order, however tentative, implicit in the very fact of existence. 
 
Swimming in the Flood is a dark and disturbing book about the edges of human behaviour: a collection of moving and beautifully made poems that confirm John Burnside's position as one of Britain's finest poets.

Amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation, John Burnside has just been awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous other awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Petrarca Prize and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. His most recent books are The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction. He is a professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.

Swimming In The Flood

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John Burnside

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