Overview

The Apothecary of Flight by Jane Burn is a heady flight into the art of poetry itself: its vital importance as a tool for expression; for understanding and translating the self; for articulating the sheer force and joy of poetry and the way, for a person with autism, it can hold, identify and celebrate both the smallest and weightiest of life's experiences and concepts. These unfettered and exquisite poems pulse with the details of both the wild and tame, the sacred and the humane – observing nature and animals with an artist’s eye, capturing the ways in which place and time can hold the experiences of the body, memory and identity. This ongoing dialogue with poetry itself sets a visionary path towards discovery – the page as a place to root oneself, a place of deep creative freedom, self-permission, belonging and defiance. Ultimately, the form, presence and physicality of Burn’s extraordinary poems move us with compassion towards the happiest solitude of words, and of love.

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9781913437961

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Reviews

‘What Jane Burn does with words, with spaces, with breath, is unlike anyone else. Delighting the reader’s eye with her shapes, curves and ocular maps, Burn dances from the most abstract intangibles - miracles, clouds, time – to the most sensual and physical: a horse’s back; a teapot. Slipping through these darkly playful, deeply poignant poems are ghosts, imaginary friends, the joy of what is not, and the voices of beloved bears, horses and other creatures. With its astonishment of language, The Apothecary of Flight will break your heart and you will be glad of it.’ – Tania Hershman ‘” I have made a friend of echoes”. In Jane Burn’s stunning poetry collection, The Apothecary of Flight, everything has a memory: a tree, a hand-hewn pot, a dandelion, an earthwork sculpture, the aerial calligraphy of birds. Their reverberations are a language talking us through the dark and unmapped paths of self-doubt and ostracization, till we are guided to the radiant wonder of our individual ways of seeing, and of voicing. In these pages you will encounter a freedom you had not realised words could bring you; where stepping into each line is like discovering the miracle of transience, showing you how to “measure the truth of a cloud” without the cold permanence of facts, gifting you “instead of knowledge, air”. Burn’s poems celebrate the mind’s shared perception with everything it regards, folding the land’s myths into its own stories, making its own becoming. Read this transcendent book and you will learn how to listen to the echoes, attending to the secrets they sing through you, till you too can “speak in skylarks”. This is a soaring, scintillating, skilfully crafted collection from a master word-sculptor. It will change your view of what poetry can do forever.’ - Dr Chris Laoutaris ‘Jane Burn explores pain, love and so much more in this brilliant new book – here are deftly intertwined themes of ageing, nature, motherhood, families, lost love, friendship and language. She examines what is and isn’t real, what matters, the shadowy overhang of the past. Love shines strongest in the animal poems, with their galloping, bucking, kinetic energy; animals are portrayed as friends, as truth and beauty, as the heart of the poet and her world. Burn’s skill as a wordwitch leads to expert shaping and spacing, using all the tricks that language and form can deliver in mesmerising word and structure play. She is also rebellious, and deliciously linguistically subversive.” - Di Slaney

Author Information

Jane Burn is an award-winning, working-class, pansexual, autistic person, poet, artist, and essayist. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University, where she won the 2022 academic prize for best overall performance. In 2022, Jane explored her neurodivergent writer’s theories funded by Arts Council England and is currently putting these ideas into a book. In 2023 she was awarded a grant by the Royal Literary Fund. Her poems are widely published and anthologised. She lives off-grid with her family in a Northumberland cottage for most of the year.

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