John Burnside

A collection of strange, unnerving poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song. These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast. Poems that recognise we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why they fail to love us.

A brutal and moving tale of the poet John Burnside's extraordinary relationship with his father. A beautifully written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the constants of his father's world: men defined by the drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo.

In these exquisitely written short stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment; all kinds of women, all kinds of men – lonely, unfaithful, dying. People for whom the idea of ‘home’ has become increasingly intangible,