LEARNING TO SLEEP

Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, John Burnside's first collection of poetry in four years - from the author's mother, commemo rated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire l andscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpecte dly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god...[Read more]