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.
the snake is a snake;
but the toad has a human face, in the hidden gallery under the roof, where the masons
practised their art, away from the bishops and kings.
We’ve seen this much before (in Salisbury, say, or that chapel above the Esk
at Rosslyn): a refuge for the pagan in the chill
of Christendom, a Green Man in the fabric of the stone; a running
boar; the sacred hare; or else
the...
NRS 125.330: Want of understanding. When either of the parties to a marriage for want of understanding shall be incapable of assenting thereto, the marriage shall be void from the time its nullity shall be declared by a court of competent authority.
Conditions for the Dissolution of Marriage under the Nevada State Legislature
When it no longer smells like an orchard standing all around me...
‘I’m sorry, but you have to leave now.’ I am in a café. I don’t know the name, I just walked in and found a place to sit down, tired from an afternoon of traipsing around a city that has always been a bit much for me: too polluted, too noisy, too crowded. Now, however, that fatigue is turning into an inexplicable but near overwhelming lethargy, and I am...
To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before … At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and lending a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs.
Neil Munro, ‘The Lost Pibroch’
We were talking about the hills when the land fell silent.
By that...
Die Musik bei einem Hochzeitszug erinnert mich immeran die Musik von Soldaten, die in den Krieg ziehen.
Heine
June will continue white, with outbreaks of rice; though, given the numbers, it’s difficult not to assume
that one of these persons now present will soon take the cure in a series of high-ceilinged rooms that was once
The Merchant’s House, at the heart of an Alpine...
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’)....
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.