BURNSIDE, John

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Nationality: Scottish. Born: Dunfermline, Fife, 19 March 1955. Career: Software engineer, Enterprise Systems, Thames Ditton, 1988–90; knowledge engineer, Syntelligence, Redhill, Surrey, 1990–94; self-employed, 1994–95; creative writing fellow, University of Dundee, 1995–98; poet in residence, Stirling University, 1999. Since 1999 writer-in-residence, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Awards: Scottish Arts Council Book awards, 1988, 1991, 1995; Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, 1994, for Feast Days.

Publications

Poetry

The Hoop. Manchester, Carcanet, 1988.

Common Knowledge. London, Secker and Warburg, 1991.

Feast Days. London, Secker and Warburg, 1992.

The Myth of the Twin. London, Jonathan Cape, 1994.

Swimming in the Flood. London, Jonathan Cape, 1995.

A Normal Skin. London, Jonathan Cape, 1997.

The Asylum Dance. London, Jonathan Cape, 2000.

Novels

The Dumb House. London, Jonathan Cape, 1997.

The Mercy Boys. London, Jonathan Cape, 1999.

Short Stories

Burning Elvis. London, Jonathan Cape, 2000.

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Critical Studies: by Ian McMillan, in Poetry Review, 84(1), Spring 1994; "Rencontre avec John Burnside" by Francoise Abrial, in Europe, 75(817), 1997.

John Burnside comments:

I find it difficult to define my work or even to discuss it in the usual terms (e.g., influences). I have mostly written poetry to date, and while I admire many of my contemporaries, I usually look to them for the qualities I lack and would not claim to be "influenced," any more than one is influenced by cinema, or music, or whatever. If pushed, I'd tend to define myself in the negative: that I do not belong to this or that group, that I do not share certain views or interests.

The concerns of my poetry: To begin with I was interested in the question of the real and with the ability of language to express the sense of the sacred, that area of experience that Wittgenstein refers to as the "mystical" (the fact of the world's existence). I was also much concerned with the natural world and the cycles of decay and regeneration. In recent work I have been concerned with ideas related to dwelling and to the exploration of just ways of being with others on this earth. What I dream about, and tentatively suggest, is an idea of community, continuity, and acceptance.

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With the publication of John Burnside's first book, The Hoop, in 1988 it was evident that a new voice, an individual cadence and way of finding words for our perception of the universe, had entered English poetry. These lines are from his poem "Inside":

                     Sometimes we feel the wind
   against a door; sometimes we speak
   of kinship with the dark, but never step
   beyond the patio, and night is best
   appreciated in this hoop of light
   where dripping is and everybody knows
   magic is somewhere else, where no one goes.

Since The Hoop other books have appeared, and with each collection I have a sense that the voltage is increasing. In contrast to the trivia, cleverness, and dull predictability of much current English poetry—emotion without intellect, fancy without imagination—Burnside's poems concern "the mystery of things" (to quote Shake-speare's Lear). As in "Home," they express with beauty an interior journey, an attempt to understand our world:

   Like me, you sometimes waken
   early in the dark

   thinking you have driven miles
   through inward country,
 
 
   feeling around you still
   the streaming trees and startled waterfowl
   and summered cattle
   swinging through your headlamps.

The poems find words for perceptions "on the borders of language," and, as in "The Forest of Beguilement," they are radiant with mythologies and images from nature:

   Nobody travels far, to see
   the massed, snow-feathered twig-light
   of the wood.

As Ezra Pound wrote, "Some men move in phantasmagoria; the images of their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill land and forest, travel with them." These words could have been written about Burnside; he is deeper than being just another pastoral poet. "Nature Poem," which is from his finest book, The Myth of the Twin, illustrates this and is short enough to quote entire:

   The dark interior. But not the landscape
   out beyond the fog
 
 
   where others go,
   and not the greenhouse with its dripping tap
 
 
   and furred begonias,
   but something that resembles both
 
 
   and neither: a state of mind,
   a sense of the mildew and fern
 
 
   rankness in some corner of the soul
   where wounds are healed,
 
 
   a subtlety that lingers on the skin
   through sleep or love, or when the hooded dead
 
 
   reveal us all as shivers in the wind
   gusted on woods and wheatfields after rain.

—William Cookson