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.
I have a dream I wake from, now and then, mostly in summer, the swallows etching my walls with shadow, eider drowsing on the firth, the gold light in the street trees thick with gnats:
surprised, as I slip from my bed, to see my neighbours’ cars, their bedroom windows curtained, someone moving on the street – a paper boy, the milkman on his rounds –
when, only a moment...
Stepping outside in the dark, if only to fetch the coal, this December night,
I stop in a river of wind on the cellar steps
and think of men, no different from me, transforming themselves at will
to animals – misshapen lives suspended in the blood
slithering loose and loping away through the snow
half-flesh, half-dream;
or, coming in, I turn to face the cold
with nothing in my veins but...
Matthew 19-22
This is as good as it gets: this cold fog over the water, this pale companion to the dreams I can’t forget and never quite recall.
Stale afternoon. My neighbour stands in her yard and watches the sky: her children are gone; her husband is lost at sea; how she remembers them now is by looking out patterns
for Arran sweaters, mittens, balaclavas. Her landlord, a lickspittle...
Annunciation with zero point field
Sitting up late in the dark I think you’re about to tell me that story I’ve heard before
of a creature pulled from the ice, or prised from a ditch, its body a hundred years old, but the eyes intact and hardly a trace of decay
on the frost-white skin; and later, how they cut along the spine and found two spurs of cartilage above
the shoulder...
For Lucas
Morning; the usual walk to the harbour: the tide half-out the fat mud fretted with bird-prints light slurred with oil and slicked reflections ice white or coffee brown strawberry red or a blue that never arrives at daylight.
We are here so you can name the world you know one object at a time: fishing boat, lighthouse, herring gull, open sky, those shoals of fish that skirt 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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