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.
This is our game for now, rehearsing words to make the world seem permanent, and ours; before it disappears, I will have named all we can see, from here to the snow on Kvannfjellet, the yarrow in the grass, a passing swan, eider and black-backed gull at the rim of the sound.
I gloss uncertainties – this lime green weed that fetches up a yard above the tide; those seabirds...
The trick is to create a world from nothing
– not the sound a blackbird makes in drifted leaves;
not dogwood or the unexpected scent of jasmine by the west gate
not the clouds reflected in these puddles all around the bowling-green deserted after rain and darker than an early Polaroid –
but nothing which is present in the flesh as ripeness is: a lifelong urgency.
The trick is in...
But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go.
Lennon-McCartney
I Driving to MirtiotissaWe learned to avoid the village to drive through the olive groves...
Although it sets out to explore the lives of Fred and Rosemary West – along with Peter Sutcliffe, the most notorious figures in recent British criminal history – Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way. ‘Brutal’ and ‘senseless’ are, of course, the terms customarily used to describe such crimes, part of the mechanism by which a society distances itself from the horror it discovers in its midst; the most common epithets for the perpetrators are ‘monster’ and ‘madman’.’‘
Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78)
Weeks out of school: in rainstorms and grandmothers’ cupboards, bear-dark in the corners, filigrees of lacewing and silt;
the birds we saw in books: merganser, stork; trees from botanic gardens printed on air; the words in our minds like games that would never be finished: names for moments at sea; or how a skin
is altered by a history of shade: the...
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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