John Burnside contributed many poems to the LRB. 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 taught at St Andrews. He also wrote several novels, two collections of short stories and three books of memoir, parts of which were first published in the paper.
My son is learning insects – woodlouse bee a line of ants a lone fritillary. He finds them on a flagstone or a leaf and quizzes them the start of dialogue and so
commencement of the soul’s unfolding self-invention in a world that shifts and turns but really has no end
and surely what we mean by soul is something no anatomist could find: a total sum of movement and exchange how...
I walk in a shower of ice on the Finnmarksvidda: freezing rain, not snow; hard pearls of ice, stinging my face and hands as I make my way to the frozen lake. No sign of life – just scats and moulted hair; but something calls from far across the water, some elemental, lost beneath the sky, darker than flesh and blood when it calls again then waits, as if it wanted me to answer
and snow...
The linguist Ole Stig Andersen was keen to seek out the remaining traces of a West Caucasian language called Ubykh. Having heard that there was one remaining speaker he set out to find the man and arrived in his village on 8 October 1992. The man had died a few hours earlier.
At times, in those last few months, he would think of a word and he had to remember the tree, or the species of frog,
...
for Will Maclean
I HouseIf the house in a dream is how I imagine myself:
room after room of furniture no one could use;
stairs leading upwards to nothing; an empty hall
filling with snow where a door has been left ajar;
then whatever I make of the one room high in the roof
where something alive and frantic is hopelessly trapped,
whatever I make of the sweetness it leaves behind
on waking,...
It never switches off; even asleep we listen in to gravity itself.
Crossing a field is one long exercise in equilibrium – a player’s grace –
though what we mean by that has more to do
with music than the physics we imagine.
A history of forest and the murk of oceans, nice
adjustments in the memory of bone
lead us to this: the gaze; the upright form.
Lemur and tree-shrew linger...
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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