Mark Burnhope

Biographical note:  Mark Burnhope was born in 1982 and studied at London School of Theology before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications. He currently lives and writes in Bournemouth, Dorset with his partner, four stepchildren, two geckos and a greyhound. This is his first book of poetry.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718733
ISBN:  9781844718733
Author:  Mark Burnhope
Title:  The Snowboy
Series:  Salt Modern Voices
Product class:  BF
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  30-Jul-11
Extent:  44pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  3 mm
Weight:  66 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 6.5
Price:  USD 9.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Mark Burnhope's poems peer out over disability, faith and prejudice. They visit town and sea, husband and wife, monuments to grief built of snow, steel, stone. They take us to a talking tree and an outcast crew including Pinocchio, Queequeg and Quasimodo. But at their heart, there is great warmth.

Main description:  Mark Burnhope's poems present a generous but moral quizzing of the world. Peering out over disability, faith and the host of prejudices that spring from such ground, they negotiate a path through lyricism and music, didacticism and narrative, comedy and confession, slang and slur in their search for a voice with which to speak. They visit town and sea, husband and wife and monuments to grief built of snow, steel, stone. They take us to a hydrotherapy session, a talking tree and an outcast crew including Pinocchio, Queequeg and Quasimodo. But at their heart, there is great warmth. Burnhope asks uncomfortable questions of the rhyme or reason for loss and healing, even as he challenges received perceptions of disabled life with wit, verve and an inclusive imagination.

Table of contents:
Emoliage
The Little White Poem
To My Restored Example, Pinnochio
Wheelchair, Recast as a Site of Special Pastoral Interest
Milo Won't Go in the Water
The Ideal Bed
To My Familiar, Queequeg
To My Best-kept, Quasimodo
The Man Upstairs Drafts a Letter to the Councils
Our Jonah of Boscombe Pier
Twelve Steps towards Better Despair
Dream Invertebration
The Well and the Ceiling Rose
Queequeg (Reprise)
The Snowboy
Shinglehenge
Christogamy
The Centre
The Letting Tree
The Serpentine Verses
The House, the Church and Fisherman's Walk

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Excerpt from book:  

The Ideal Bed

Double bed which shouldn’t look
like this: so skewiff but no one on,
I can’t even stand to smooth its sheet.
I try to circle round it, but my wheels
won’t fit down the right side, the one
which, incidentally, I try to imagine hides
who we were five years ago: you standing
heaving the bed to and fro, trying to catch
our south-facing garden’s light
(the bulbs were always blowing)
and me laughing; then afterwards
us, falling bed-long into this
self-same undividable iron maiden.
My nurse has just replaced our mattress
with a manmade, farcical memory-foam
thing: cures pressure sores faster.
You’d laugh if you could be here.
Remember shopping in IKEA,
wondering what kind of carpenter
constructed, folded, boxed and sold our bed?
Hardly an artist, probably couldn’t
have given an actual fuck, you said.
When we got home the bed refused to stand
up in the room we’d meant for it. In its form,
we saw the ideal parts to shed:
a little off this surface, that corner.
We grew hungry, desperately so
pushed it against the larder door
so neither of us could hoard
when the waves crashed hard. Its back
was flimsy chipboard and would give
out in the year’s most unnewsworthy
quake, if the front of the frame stayed.
So you sanded back for days, weeks,
months; pored over cookbooks,
catalogues and promotions; reclined
on the mattress like an ocean, faced
me and my canvas, and said, Draw!
(But the kitchen bulb was dying.)
Hardness the Lord made then tore:
the one you pushed aside to get past
the fact we never found
the perfect light to lie in.

Unpublished endorsement:  Affectionate, hip but not snooty, visionary and anti-square.

Ira Lightman

Unpublished endorsement:  Mark Burnhope draws on fairytale and transformation to spin his own techno-mythology in this quirky and intelligent debut.

Angela Topping

Unpublished endorsement:  This debut pamphlet introduces a serious and playful, tender and ironic, strong and coherent new voice. A definite talent to watch.

Andrew Philip

Unpublished endorsement:  Imagine Zaccheus turning tables at the Internet Café, Paul turning back into Saul, confuse dying with flying, imagine a wheelchair recast in a pastoral landscape. Burnhope speaks movingly of human weakness and physical frailty, of strength and lightness of spirit

Helen Ivory

Unpublished endorsement:  Mark Burnhope’s work is concerned with the physical – how a town is a physical place, how we live in a world of machines, our bodies among them. Many of the poems address disability, not only in the narrow sense our culture understands it but also in the wider sense that our physicality acts as a pathetic curb on the life of the spirit. The poems (which are machines themselves, we’ve been told) shake with the joy and frustration of living.

Tony Williams