The Empire of Forgetting

by Burnside, John

Poetry

Published 07/08/2025 by Vintage Publishing (Jonathan Cape Ltd) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 64 pages

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN'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