John Burnside

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;and the place thereof shall know it no more....

First day of snow, the low sun glinting on the gate post where a single Teviot ewe is licking frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep away in the lower field, the light on the crusted meadow grass that makes me think of unripe plums so local an event it seems, for one long breath, that time might stop; or, better, that it isn’t me at all who stands...

As a teenager, I spent many hours in the section of the library where the art books were kept, partly to be out of the house and away from where anyone might track me down, and partly because I was searching for an ideal of cleanness, a personal Elysium. It probably goes without saying that Corby reference library had a rather limited collection of art books, and in many of those it did...

That old cliché: it seemed that time had stopped;

and people we thought we knew came quietly out of the cold

to meet us. Some of us thought

it had something to do with the sun, and some, with how the planets were aligned,

but later, when the river froze for miles, we took our first crazed steps into an air

we’d never breathed till then, our strange companions smiling,...

Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian tundra. It was something that never should have happened: 99 times out of a hundred, I am a sensible, even cautious wanderer, but that morning, in an odd mood I couldn’t explain other than to say,...