Author(s): Joanne Burns

Poetry

This new collection by Joanne Burns focuses on investigations and appraisals of spiritual and religious experiences, their traces, and their impact on language. Amphora opens with an extended sequence on the lives of saints, narrated by a veteran of a Catholic upbringing, and a single-sex, convent school. It is populated by nuns and martyrs, pilgrims, priests and deities from both Eastern and Western religions, full of the mad energy and satirical wit that is characteristic of Burns' work. The themes of suffering and virtue, icons, and idiom are then interwoven into a series of poems dealing with Burns' more familiar territory of language and imagination, food and ritual, celebrity, politics and society.