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John BurnsideJohn Burnside
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Critical perspective
BiographyPoet and novelist John Burnside was born on 19 March 1955 in Dunfermline, Scotland, and now lives in Fife. He studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. He is a former Writer in Residence at Dundee University and now teaches at the University of St Andrews.
His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His poetry collection, The Good Neighbour (2005), was shortlisted for the 2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Poetry, Short stories
BibliographyThe Hoop Carcanet, 1988 Common Knowledge Secker & Warburg, 1991 Feast Days Secker & Warburg, 1992 The Myth of the Twin Cape, 1994 Swimming in the Flood Cape, 1995 Penguin Modern Poets 9 (John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Kathleen Jamie) Penguin, 1996 A Normal Skin Cape, 1997 The Dumb House Cape, 1997 The Mercy Boys Cape, 1999 Burning Elvis Cape, 2000 Love for Love: An Anthology of Love Poems (editor) Polygon, 2000 The Asylum Dance Cape, 2000 The Light Trap Cape, 2001 The Locust Room Cape, 2001 Living Nowhere Cape, 2003 The Wild Reckoning (editor with Maurice Riordan) Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004 The Good Neighbour Cape, 2005 A Lie About My Father Cape, 2006 Selected Poems Cape, 2006 Gift Songs Cape, 2007 The Devil's Footprints Cape, 2007 Glister Cape, 2008 The Hunt in the Forest Cape, 2009 Waking Up in Toytown Cape, 2010
Prizes and awards1988 Scottish Arts Council Book Award The Hoop 1991 Scottish Arts Council Book Award Common Knowledge 1994 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize Feast Days 2000 Encore Award The Mercy Boys 2000 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) The Asylum Dance 2000 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) The Asylum Dance 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award The Asylum Dance 2002 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award (shortlist) The Light Trap 2002 T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) The Light Trap 2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) The Good Neighbour 2007 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) (shortlist) Gift Songs 2008 Catherine Maclean Prize (shortlist) The Devil's Footprints 2008 Cholmondeley Award 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) The Devil's Footprints 2010 Scottish Arts Council Book Award (shortlist) The Hunt in the Forest
Critical PerspectiveJohn Burnside’s haunting poem ‘Halloween’, from The Myth of the Twin (1994), finds its speaker building a bonfire at night, having ‘peeled the bark from the tree // to smell its ghost, / and walked the boundaries of ice and bone’. These markers of seasonal change are thus linked to a sense of death and the numinous, associations strengthened by observing leaf-mould ‘like the first elusive threads / of unmade souls’. His memoir A Lie About My Father (2006) also significantly opens with thoughts about the long-time importance to him of Halloween. He invokes it as a time when the natural world and the supernatural come together, ‘the possibility that the dead come back’. The book itself, as frequently harrowing stories and memories are disclosed, in effect brings back a particular dead person – his alcoholic father, whose physical and psychological impact on the author’s life it makes clear. Burnside’s writing, prolific and distinguished in both poetry and fiction, seems haunted by his father’s story, by the supernatural and the spiritual. Fatherhood itself is seen as ‘a narrative’, in which father-figures and sons recur.
Burnside is a Scottish poet with philosophical, ecological and religious concerns. He is conscious, as he observed when introducing The Light Trap (2001), of ‘mostly working outside the British mainstream’ and feeling ‘privileged by this’ [Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Summer 2002]. He went on to state that ‘I consider the animal and plant life around me, not as metaphors, or emblems, but as living forms, with whom I would discover a continuity’. This is well illustrated by ‘Field Mice’, regarded not as pests but ‘as guests, / The closest we come to wild, on this tidy street’. The poem beautifully captures their ‘glide of skin and bone’ and comes to identify with them, ‘sharing their fear, / as if our lives were scribbled on the air / or ciphered in the dust’. Burnside is very much a nature poet of the present day, apt to encounter nature unexpectedly when out driving, ‘the animals that flit across our headlights’ (‘Animals’).
Of Burnside’s ten poetry collections thus far, perhaps the most representative of what Adam Thorpe in The Observer called his ‘singular music’ is The Asylum Dance (2000), which won that year’s Whitbread Poetry Prize. It is dominated by four long poems of travel, memory and visions, written in sinuously open lines. ‘Ports’ presents Scottish harbour scenes (‘a dwelling place / for something in ourselves that understands // the beauty of wreckage’), its speaker evoking the boats, working fishermen, and the ever-darkening sky as it comes on to snow. By contrast, the closing work ‘Roads’ describes a journey of foreign ‘white-hot streets and the slide of traffic’. The speaker wonders about angels, ‘or Pan / - that god of sudden absence / come from the shadows to meet you’. Among shorter works, ‘Kestrel’ stands out for its brilliant imagery of the dead bird’s feathers ‘perfect as bronze’, which are ‘haunted with the aftertaste of life’. The title poem is truly memorable. Its speaker and his mother are dancing with the patients of a mental hospital, who are ‘subtle as ghosts, yet real, with the vague / good-humour of the lost’. Readers wishing to be convinced of Burnside’s powers should read this poem, its dream-like way drawing us into a peculiar scenario of lost love and other-worldliness.
His most recent collection is Gift Songs (2007), his most difficult and overtly religious work, making connections between God and faith, the human and the non-human, as well as exploring places and the natural world in his characteristic way. ‘Four Quartets’ are not only a gesture towards T.S. Eliot’s great poem exploring some of the same concerns, but his own responses to the string quartets of Bartok and Benjamin Britten. In other sections, Burnside’s ‘varieties of religious experience’ are related to, and often take place in, nature: ‘No one invents the quiet that runs in the grass, / the summer wind, the sky, the meadowlark’. In the most engaging sequence, ‘5 Animals’ describes ‘Arctic Fox’, Rock Pipits’, ‘Eider House’, ‘Collie’, and ‘Coyotes’.
However, Burnside never loses sight of the fact that mankind is also an animal, capable of savagery and prone to the dangerous impulses of sexual desire. Indeed, in his poem ‘Animals’, Burnside refers to the self as ‘that mess of memory and fear / that wants, remembers, understands, denies’, a phrase whose significance becomes apparent throughout his novels. Fears and memories that are glimpsed in the poems become writ large in his fiction. His first novel, The Dumb House (1997), has a theme of exploring the basis of human language, but its psychopathic narrator pursues this as a murderous experiment to find ‘the locus of the soul’. Firstly seducing the mother of a dumb child, he then goes on to father twins by a dumb vagrant woman, regarding them as ‘laboratory animals’. Convinced that ‘to know the soul, I would have to know language’, he forces matters to a suitably gory surgical conclusion.
Indeed, Burnside’s novels are ‘not for the squeamish’. This is also the case with The Locust Room (2001), set in Cambridge in the mid-1970s when the so-called Cambridge Rapist preyed on female students. ‘Preyed’ is an apt word, as the rapist’s viewpoint is that of a predator, who ‘should have been an animal – a polecat or a wolverine’. One might regard Burnside’s best fictional writing as being in his memoir, A Lie About My Father, as it weaves memory, dialogue and incident together in recounting his father’s story as well as his own excesses with drink and drugs. Painful accounts of the effects of alcoholism on the family ensue, explaining how their lives came to run ‘on near parallel lines’. Many incidents and details reappear elsewhere in Burnside’s writing: the ‘ghost’ twin, the solace sought in visionary states and in the natural world. By the conclusion in a harbour-side walk with his own son, compassion has submerged bitterness, observing of his father: ‘I’ve missed him all my life’.
The Devil’s Footprints (2007) tells of a solitary man’s search for redemption, as a murder committed during childhood comes back to haunt a man discontented with his life and marriage. During the course of an epic walk back to his home village he has to undergo a traumatic test of endurance and reconciliation with nature. Glister (2008), very much in the fantasy horror genre, is a striking combination of mystery, the gothic and the eco-thriller. Set in a decaying post-industrial Innertown, a series of disappearances of adolescent boys are being covered up. Its teenage narrator is involved in sex and violence with his gang, but then encounters the mysterious Moth Man – a father-figure who may be something more sinister. The dark shadows in both John Burnside’s poetry and fiction continue to haunt his readers.
Dr Jules Smith, 2009
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