Empire of Forgetting

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets'A master of language' HILARY MANTELJohn Burnside s last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme mortality and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with death, creating a powerfully moving exploration of memory, forgetting and the seven ages.Here, as always, there is a clear-eyed curiosity; a sense of wonder at the beleaguered natural world and its endless mutability its hidden beauty, often suddenly disclosed and a deep faith in its old gods. Burnside was always as much a spirit-guide as a poet, and here, in the Empire of Forgetting, we are never far from a fresh alertness to the world, to epiphany a sudden, spiritual manifestation.There is a sense, too, in these last poems, of a man having found a dwelling place a sense of rest and peace and settlement with the world. A state of grace.'Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched ANDREW O'HAGAN A titan of literature' KATHLEEN JAMIE