About Rite of Passage

Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage is an initiation into what it means to be alive on the planet in the midst of extinction, of climate, environmental and systematic collapse. It is a journey into the shadow of man’s distorted relationship with the earth. And yet in the utter darkness of this hour, these often provocative poems suggest that there is hope. That we have had to come to the edge of our own annihilation as a species to collectively shift how we live, that only in the dark glare of this crisis, can a new world from the ashes of the old one now be formed.

Fiona Benson

‘Stark, original, obsessive, and visionary, the poems in ‘Rite of Passage’ are prophecies of an uncanny musicality. Imagine a blend of Cormac McCarthy and Louise Glück and you begin to approach an understanding of the frightening desecrations and oracular clarities of this book. Bury walks through the burnings of an accelerated world, through drought and miscarried years, through snow and nuclear fallout, bringing poems of apocalyptic horror and raw beauty, returning us with new consciousness to the fallen world. The prayer is implicit throughout – let us stop, let us wake to new light. This book is fire.’

Pascale Petit

‘I haven’t come across anything like this – the astounding poems in Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage writhe with raw visionary life, as if made of bone and fire. They terrify and hypnotise. They are chants of survival, incantations to bear us safely through climate collapse and mass extinction. They draw our elemental selves out onto burning fields, and miraculously heal us. This is poetry as initiation, as Orphic oracle and rigorous truth telling.’

Niall Campbell

‘An astonishing debut. The environment has never felt so urgent; the world, through Bury’s writing, has never felt so close at hand. Mythical and raw – a terrific book.’

Tim Robertson

‘The heart-striking revelation of Dom Bury's intensely wrought, epic-reaching poetry is that only by feeling deep in ourselves the full bleakness of Climate Crisis can we find any truthful hope for our world. This is an important and profoundly moving book. Don't miss it — Tim Robertson - former head of The Society of Literature.'

Alexia Stone

‘The poems from Rite of Passage entered through pores in my skin, seeding behind flesh & within bone. Their raw blossoming burst the seams of my heart. They are incantations for a living Earth, brimming with the alchemy of healing.’

Anne-Marie Fyfe

Rite of Passage is a rite for our times, our earth, a series of quiet, sometimes mysterious, prayer-like unflinching poems that are a call for trust, collective love and to understanding 'what it means to be human'.