Name: In the Shadow of the Yew
Price: 292.00 ZAR
Availability: InStock
Author: John Barnie
ISBN: 9781788641920

Type

Physical Book

Publisher

Cinnamon Press

Author

John Barnie

Year

2026

Pages

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

21.90 x 14.00 cm

ISBN13

9781788641920

In the Shadow of the Yew

John Barnie (Author) · Cinnamon Press · Paperback

New Book Imported to South Africa

Delivery: 25 Aug - 03 Sep

R 292

R 292

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Synopsis "In the Shadow of the Yew"

In a tight sequence of 33 poems, In the Shadow of the Yew, John Barnie leads us through ‘the cemetery of hopes’ (Conrad). A layered monologue in a distinctive voice that is incisive and deeply questioning, Barnie asks whether the suffering of humanity and the suffering we inflict renders our species a curse. ‘...better than both / is the one who has never been born, / who has not seen the evil / that is done under the sun.’ says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and Barnie sits in a long line of writers who consider that the natural world would be better off without us. There’s a note of Leopardi, Hardy, Beckett, Cioran and, above all, Robinson Jeffers in this unflinching collection, with a tone that builds on Jeffers’s The Double Axe and its philosophy of inhumanism. And yet, at the heart of this collection, is tenderness and compassion. Woven through poems that refuse to turn away from war and torture, starvation, greed, injustice and suffering, there are glimpses of a childhood by the banks of the Usk, fragments of the stories of friends and loved ones and homage to writers who have come before the poet. And there is a litany of extinct flora and fauna interspersed through the sequence as well as lines mourning so much loss:six hundred million birds have disappeared from Europe what tonnage is that how many hearts pattering faster than rain on a canopy of leavesAt heart there is a delight in the world that humanity is laying waste to, a yearning for life that is otherwise and the repeated cry: What do we do now?