poemof the moment
Lucille Ball
lights up the screen
like someone who’s
been there forever.
Continue reading Late show by John Burnside
about the poem
This poem was chosen for Best Scottish Poems 2011. Best Scottish Poems is an annual online anthology published by the Scottish Poetry Library, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2011 is Roddy Lumsden. (Image: Lucille Ball by elena-lu, under a Creative Commons licence)
poem chosen by…
Roddy Lumsden
Burnside's latest, Black Cat Bone, has been acclaimed and rewarded; it is less a 'return to form' as some have said, more an inclusive, less obsessive book, which allows room for a subject which was previously only an occasional visitor to Burnside's ample back catalogue: popular culture. Here, though the poem is reflective, and the television references keep it light, it never quite shakes off the powerful note of failure / false pride in the poem's first statement.
Read more about the SPL Team
poet
John Burnside
John Burnside is a poet and novelist whose work explores fundamental spiritual and ecological issues about the nature of our dwelling on earth. His first collection of poems, The Hoop, was published in 1988; it, and the follow-up Common Knowledge, won Scottish Arts Council Book Awards. In 2011, his collection Black Cat Bone won both the Forward Prize and the T S Eliot Prize. Burnside is also a prolific prose-writer.
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Robyn Marsack, Director of the SPL, reading sheep poems at the Old MacDonald event at The Glasgow Art Club. @oxfam t.co/aoJ3obpH
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