A Normal Skin [Paperback]

With five poetry volumes and a novel (The Dumb House, 1997) to his credit, this Scottish-born writer continues to explore the darkness within the natural world and the difficulties in human relations. Burnside scatters the effluvia and offal of animal and insect throughout his homely poems about weasels, rats, foxes, and road kill. Searching for order and reason, he marvels at a womans handling of a dead snake (Snake); an owl released from netting reminds him of a difficult separation of his own, as does hitting a deer with his car on a dark road (A Process of Separation). Confronting lossof his father, of his own difficult and unrelenting lovethe poet sees angels and ghosts but dismisses them as vapors. Occasionally insightful (in poems such as Agoraphobia and Simon of Cyrene), Burnsides mostly drab observations more often take a nihilistic turnhes somber, when not just morbid. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From memories of childhood and personal loss to the quiet celebration of a lover's navigational skills, from meditations on nature and sexuality to the fantasy world of aquarium fish, the poems in A NORMAL SKIN cover a wide range: lyrical in tone, and highly visual, they express once again the poet's sense of wonder at the world, while exploring some new preoccupations, including love and identity the tension between masking and self-revelation, and the writer's pleasure at returning to Scotland after a long absense. Most significant, however, is the continuing exploration of the relationship between self and other, and of the constant shifting of territory and boundaries, seen through the prism of love and home.

John Burnside was born in 1955 and now lives in Fife. He has published five previous collections and has won a number of awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was selected as one of the twenty Best of Young British Poets in 1994. His first novel is The Dumb House.