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.
There is no evidence that Rimbaud ever visited Scarborough. Graham Robb
At times, it feels like someone else’s dream, copious rain, when it comes, and the sense of Paraclete in every tongue of flame and hymnsong in the sky above the fen;
and nightfall, in the gaps between the hills, is quick and unrelenting, like the mouth that glides out from the ditch, no voice to tell what...
Quest’è ’l verno, ma tal che gioia apporte
Antonio Vivaldi
If you think she exists like that, you should think again. It’s winter now, and love is not the question.
Children see wolves through the trees and the beauty astounds them.Winter, they say; it’s winter, and joy is the question.
Mistake her for what you will: when she stands in your path at evening,...
for Lucas
There is too much light in the world to bear the weight of Euclid, too much fog, with shore birds, bright in the salt-water channels thinning the sands, the Black-Tailed
Godwit, the Curlew Sandpiper, named from the field guide, but still uncertain, still defiantly heraldic.
I’ve lived through days like these before and scarcely noticed, skylarks hidden in my sleeves,...
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...
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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