Selected Poems

Over 17 years and nine collections, John Burnside has built—in the words of Bernard O’Donoghue—"a poetic corpus of the first significance," a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His territory is the no-man’s-land of threshold and margin, the charmed half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with mystery, myth, and longing. In this volume these themes emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside’s sinuous lyric poise: the place of the individual in the world,...