''A master of language'' HILARY MANTEL
John 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- He now leaves behind a body of work that
