Poem: ‘Fields’
John Burnside, 16 July 1998
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
I LandfillIn ways the dead are laid or how they come to lie I recognise myself...
John Burnside
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.
Poem: ‘Settlements’
John Burnside, 16 April 1998
God answers our prayers by refusing them.
Luther
I A Place by the SeaBecause what we think of as home is a hazard to others, our shorelines edged with rocks and shallow sandbanks reefs where navigation fails
we mark the harbour out with lights and noise: flickers of green and scarlet in the dark...
Poem: ‘Ports’
John Burnside, 21 August 1997
Pas de port. Ports inconnus.
Henri Michaux
I HavenOur dwelling place: the light above the firth;
shipping forecasts; gossip; theorems;
the choice of a single word, to describe the gun-metal grey of the sky, as the...
Poem: ‘Heimwhe’
John Burnside, 20 February 1997
Remembering the story of a man who left the village one bright afternoon, wandering out in his shirt-sleeves and never returning, I walk in this blur of heat to the harbour wall, and sit with my hands in my pockets, gazing back at painted houses, shopfronts, narrow roofs, people about their business, neighbours, tourists, the gaunt men loading boats with lobster creels, women in hats and...
Two Poems
John Burnside, 23 January 1997
Beholding
As dawn moves in from the firth I’m sitting up awake, a mug of tea fogging the window, the bones of my hands and face shot with insomnia’s delicate, lukewarm needles. You’re still asleep. Your hair is the colour of whey and your hand on the pillow is clenched, like a baby’s fist on a figment of heat, or whatever you’ve clutched in a dream, and I...
Pieces about John Burnside in the LRB
What He Could Bear: A Brutal Childhood
Hilary Mantel, 9 March 2006
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,...
War against the Grown-Ups
John Redmond, 21 August 1997
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...
Uncertainties of the Poet
Nicolas Tredell, 25 June 1992
‘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...
Imagining the Suburbs
Stan Smith, 9 January 1992
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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