John Burnside teaches at St Andrews. His poetry collections include Feast Days (1992), The Asylum Dance (2000) and Black Cat Bone (2011), which won both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He has also written several novels, two collections of short stories and three books of memoir, parts of which were first published in the LRB.
The body as the sum of all nostalgias. Empire of footfalls; Mother as Script and Ideal
– and love no chance event, no accidental stir of wings, or blueprint spiked with hospice.
What hymn tunes come to mind at Candlemas, the fence wires rimmed with ice,
our plum trees medieval in the first blue gloaming?
What carol for the kill-site, sodden plumage scattered in the grass, and beautiful?
This killing will never stop. It’s not enough to slay the beast, he has to make it clear how calm his loathing is, how utterly devoid of fellow feeling;
and though she is present, the woman is incidental; whatever he hoped in the past, he’s not here, now, for the wet...
Always, I am coming home from hunting frogs or standing in the swim of wind beneath the last dyke and the sea; and, always, she is there, in lanternglow, a light that makes this world believable.
My eyes turned from the snuff of paraffin and darkness in that house so long ago, I barely...
No doubt, in a year or two, this child will be gone; rumours of war in the air and boys at that age always impatient for something. The wide road that leads to the pond runs all the way out to the press gang – you can almost taste the glare of blood, the panic in the ranks, the dead laid out in seams of fire or lye (
Still they stood, A great wave from it going over them, As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour Had made them certain earth returned their love.
Robert Frost
If anything is safe to love, it is
the jellyfish,
The lie is told to a man he meets on the road; it is America, fall, the mid-1990s, when he stops to pick up a hitch-hiker in Upper New York State. It is almost the day of the dead, and he is tired,...
A recent newspaper story told of a young man who went to hospital, seeking attention for stomach pains. Expecting to find some sort of cyst, the doctors opened him up. What they removed instead...
‘Fin de siècle’: the term suggests a dilution and dispersal of the cultural, social and political energies of a century, an uneasy time of uncertainties as a new era waits to be...
Whole systems of thought have been founded on the French language’s inability to distinguish differing from deferring. Perhaps Napoleon is to blame (‘Not tonight, Josephine’)....
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