John Burnside

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A Lie About My Father

I Put a Spell on You

A Memoir

Waking Up in Toytown

The Empire of Forgetting

The Sea, The Sea

Ruin, Blossom

Learning to Sleep

Ashland & Vine

Still Life with Feeding Snake

The Dumb House

Living Nowhere

The Devil's Footprints

Glister

Something Like Happy

All One Breath

A Summer of Drowning

The Mercy Boys

The Locust Room

Burning Elvis

A Normal Skin

Swimming In The Flood

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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.

John Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. He died in 2024.

Swimming In The Flood

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