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Elizabeth Burns

1957 - 2015

Elizabeth Burns
POEMS LISTEN BIBLIOGRAPHY

Having spent much of her life in Scotland, Elizabeth Burns moved to Lancaster where she taught creative writing.

Her first full length collection, Ophelia and other poems, was published in 1991, and was shortlisted for the Saltire Award for First Book of the Year. Her second collection, The Gift of Light, was published in 1999, followed by The Lantern Bearers in 2007. Held, her fourth full length collection was published in 2010.

In addition to full-length collections, Elizabeth produced a number of pamphlets including The Shortest Days, which won the 2009 Michael Marks Award. The Alteration was shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Poetry Pamphlet Award.

Her work has appeared in many anthologies of Scottish poetry, including Dreamstate: the new Scottish poets (Polygon, 1994; 2002), The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poems (Faber, 2000), Modern Scottish Women Poets (Canongate, 2003), Scotlands: poet and nations (Carcanet, 2004), The Edinburgh Anthology of Twentieth-century Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (Luath, 2006).

She was an early member of Pomegranate Women Writers in Edinburgh and continued to be closely involved in a writing group in Lancaster.

Her love of pottery and identification with the craft led her to a number of collaborations with ceramicists and other makers. She also wrote about painters, including Gwen John, Winifred Nicholson, and Anne Redpath.

Elizabeth was a poet whose work was suffused with the colour and scent of ordinary lives. She was also a quietly fearless writer, never shying from the hurt done by one human to another. Her delicate and graceful poems have space in them for what has been lost or broken, for the flawed and crooked, as well as the sensuousness of the everyday, particularly in the lives of women which she celebrated in poem after poem.

A final collection, published after her death in 2016, Lightkeepers, was edited by Gerrie Fellows and Jane Routh.

Read more

Read the poems

  • Listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass in the kitchen
  • This Life
  • Grandmother
  • Second Tooth
  • Solway
  • Like
  • Beautiful mind

Listen

Selected Bibliography

Poems (Edinburgh: School of Poets, 1986)
Ophelia and other poems (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991)
The gift of light (Edinburgh: Diehard, 1999)
The time of gold (Glasgow: Galdragon, 1999)
The alteration (Glasgow: Galdragon, 2003)
The blue flower: poems from the life and art of Gwen John (Galdragon Press, 2005)
The lantern bearers (Nottingham: Shoestring, 2007)
The shortest days (Stromness: Galdragon, 2008)
Held (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010)
Bones and ivory: ice age art (2014)
A scarlet thread: Anne Redpath 1895-1965 (Lancaster: Wayleave, 2014)
A vessel opening out (www.potterpainterpoet.org, 2015)
Dorothy Wordsworth’s haiku (Edinburgh: Essence Press, 2015)
Lightkeepers (Lancaster: Wayleave, 2016)

 

From the Library Catalogue

Publications about Elizabeth Burns
Publications by Elizabeth Burns

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Elizabeth Burns, Kevin Williamson & Michael Pederson

January 2011
Elizabeth Burns reads from her recent collection Held and we also chat to legendary publisher, poet, novelist, cosmologist, editor Kevin Williamson and poet, script doctor, ex-exile Michael Pedersen, organisers of new Edinburgh poetry night, Neu! Reekie!
Listen to the Podcast

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