A highly personal work by the Scottish poet John Burnside, The Music of Time is above all an urgent defence of the power of poetry. Burnside shows us how words on the page can bring us an understanding beyond words - and beyond science - whether we are in mourning, in love (or out of it but still married to the once beloved), at war, in exile, in despair or - as now - in crisis. Enriched by Burnside's clear, luminous prose, it tackles overlooked - in this country at least - issues of translation and challenges the reader to think more deeply. About death. About life. About everything. -- Fiona Rintoul * The Herald * A rich, generous and often surprising book * The Scotsman * Burnside has written a generous, combative, honest book, which will compel re-reading and deserves to survive, as poetry itself survives, alongside the laziness and imaginative carnage of public speech in the 21st century. -- Rowan Williams * The New Statesman * A rare blend, mixing equal parts intellectual rigour and engaging conversation. -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times * A good book, combining personal reminiscence and intensive reflection on works by [ various] poets ... Burnside argues that 20th-century poetry matters because it continually interacts with contemporary social conditions and political crises, with what he calls - borrowing the phrase from Osip Mandelstam - 'the noise of time.' -- Michael Dirda * Washington Post * Burnside can describe the material world with astonishing deftness... He is the poet who more than any other writing today sees the material world and the world of thought and ideas as two sides of the most fragile of membranes. -- Fiona Sampson Burnside, who is also an accomplished poet, writes lyrical prose with virtuoso ease * Guardian * Burnside has a lovely garrulousness that is distinctively his own -- Tessa Hadley The joy of Burnside's poems - and part of what makes them moving - is that he does know and never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living. * Observer *
