The Hunt in the Forest

by John Burnside

In these poems of hunting and predation, Burnside explores our most deep-rooted and primeval pursuits: romantic love, memory, selfhood, grief, the recollection of the dead. Yet just as we seek, so are we sought out: at any moment we may slide into loss or be gathered in by some otherworldly light; at any moment, the angel of the annunciation may seek us out and demand some astonishing transformation. Even in the pursuit of love, or in the exercise of memory, we fall into snares and become entangled in veils; just as we are always on the point of discovery, so we are always a hair’s-breadth away from being lost. Concerned with love and mourning, with what we discover and what remains hidden – with learning how to follow the trail through the forest and find the way home – above all, these poems are about the quest: knowing that whatever we bring back from the hunt, it is always hard-won and never fully our own.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

John Burnside was a Scottish writer. He was the author of nine collections of poetry and five works of fiction. Burnside achieved wide critical acclaim, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes. He left Scotland in 1965, returning to settle there in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. Laterly, he lived in Fife with his wife and children and taught Creative Writing, Literature and Ecology courses at the University of St. Andrews.

[Author photo © Norman McBeath]

Reviews

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Hunt in the Forest is an incredibly short collection of poetry, running to just 52 pages, but its depth is quite astonishing. There is a real quality of beauty in Burnside's imagery, and I very much enjoyed the way in which nature and animality looped each of the poems together.

I shall leave you with an extract from 'Abridged' (a section in 'An Essay Concerning Light'):

'the second pared down
to essentials: a clouded bazaar,

a boy on his way to church
in the midsummer heat,

and someone in the kitchen, eating
pomegranates, while the wakeful dead

wandered away, through side streets
and dusty squares

with all they could carry...'

[Giovana · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

an entire banger This is what I like

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

This is an atmospheric, beautiful, yet grounded and rather raw collection.

Time weaves itself through the majority of these poems: how it is continuously going by without us being able to stop it. That we can not hold time, or catch time, it is "bouncing away to forever." Burnside mentions mid-afternoon in many poems, as if it is a no-man's land, a none time.

There is also the sense of things that are just out of reach that we cannot touch or change, like Time. A sense that some things are the way they are, and it is what you do after or with it that counts. Everything is balancing "on the cusp of forever."

[Teresa Demitrovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry "seen" from within the perspective of the hunt in the forest: words are creatures under the scrutiny of silence.

[GSGS · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked it even better than All One Breath .

[Matt Hunt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seemed to be trying so hard to be clever that it missed out on having much heart.