The Asylum Dance

POETRY TEXTS & ANTHOLOGIES. Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in "The Asylum Dance" - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry in 2000 - are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is territory that Burnside has made his own: a domestic world threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no man's land - the 'somewhere in between' - of dusk or dawn, of mists or sudden light, where the epiphanies are. Using the framework of four long poems, "Ports", "Settlements", "Fields" and "Roads", the poet balances presence with absence; we are shown the homing instinct - felt in the blood and marrow - as a pull to refuge, simplicity, and a safe haven, while at the same time hearing the siren call from the world beyond.