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 tent show had been and gone and now there was nothing but rust and sunlight, like a poultice on the grass, candy and broken glass and a spare tatter of hallelujah blown through the dust
where somebody passing through had stopped to write a half-dozen half-formed letters we couldn’t decipher out where the trailers had stood at the edge of the night
and the May Queen was...
Edinburgh Turnhouse, November 2009
IThere’s something of the sky in everything
or so it seems tonight, lights swimming up from hill-farms in the Pentlands, close to snow
between the dairy-yards and presbyteries that straggle out, in spokes of white and gold
to stars and clouds beneath the eye of heaven;
IIand always it’s there, that soft attentiveness,
not looking down,...
In the summer of 1980, I was admitted to Fulbourn mental hospital, a leafy and surprisingly pleasant institution three or four miles outside Cambridge. I don’t remember very much about the week or so that led up to this point, but I was told later that I had been hallucinating for several days, and I still recall images and fragments from what may well have been a meaningful though...
Begin with the fend-for-yourself of all the loves you learned about in story books;
fish-scale and fox-print graven on the hand forever
and a tiny hook-and-eye unfastened in the sweetmeat of a heart you thought would never grieve or come undone.
May; and already it’s autumn: broken gold and crimson in the medieval
beechwoods, where our shadows come...
He has come to a halt in the woods: snow on the path and everything gone to ground in its silken lair;
gone to ground or folded in a death so quiet, he can almost taste the fade of hair and vein,
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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