John Burnside’s most recent novel, A Summer of Drowning, is set in the Arctic Circle. Black Cat Bone just won the T.S. Eliot prize.
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From Mikita Brottman
Much as I enjoyed John Burnside’s poem ‘Hyena’, I must point out that he has his hyenas crossed (LRB, 30 June). The ‘giggle’ and pack behaviour referred to in the final stanza suggests the spotted (or ‘laughing’) hyena, but the first stanza (white mane, grey face, bat ears) describes the striped hyena, a solitary animal which does not ‘laugh’.
Mikita Brottman
Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore