Lmst

Smoke in the woods
like someone walking in a silent film
beside the tracks…

—John Burnside, “Signal Stop, Near Horsley”
published in SELECTED POEMS (Cape, 2006)

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/389400/selected-poems-by-burnside-john/9780224078030

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #winter #JohnBurnside

Signal Stop, Near Horsley
John Burnside

Smoke in the woods
like someone walking in a silent film
beside the tracks.

A shape I recognise – not smoke, or not just smoke,
and not just snow on hazels
or fox-trails from the platform to the trees,

but winter, neither friend
nor stranger, like the girl I sometimes glimpse

at daybreak near the crossing, in a dress
of sleet and berries, gazing at the train.

At times I think what makes us who we are
is neither kinship nor our given states
but something lost between the world we own
and what we dream about behind the names
on days like this

—John Burnside, “History”
Published in SELECTED POEMS (Jonathan Cape, 2006)

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/389400/selected-poems-by-burnside-john/9780224078030

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #September11 #history #JohnBurnside

John Burnside
HISTORY

St Andrews: West Sands; September 2001

Today
as we flew the kites
– the sand spinning off in ribbons along the beach
and that gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting across
the golf links;
the tide far out
and quail-grey in the distance;
people
jogging, or stopping to watch
as the war planes cambered and turned
in the morning light –

today
– with the news in my mind, and the muffled dread
of what may come –

I knelt down in the sand
with Lucas
gathering shells
and pebbles
finding evidence of life in all this
driftwork:
snail shells; shreds of razorfish;
smudges of weed and flesh on tideworn stone.

At times I think what makes us who we are
is neither kinship nor our given states
but something lost between the world we own
and what we dream about behind the names
on days like this

our lines raised in the wind
our bodies fixed and anchored to the shore

and though we are confined by property
what tethers us to gravity and light
has most to do with distance and the shapes
we find in water
reading from the book
of silt and tides
the rose or petrol blue
of jellyfish and sea anemone
combining with a child’s
first nakedness.

Sometimes I am dizzy with the fear
of losing everything – the sea, the sky,
all living creatures, forests, estuaries:
we trade so much to know the virtual
we scarcely register the drift and tug
of other bodies
scarcely apprehend
the moment as it happens: shifts of light
and weather
and the quiet, local forms
of history: the fish lodged in the tide
beyond the sands;
the long insomnia
of ornamental carp in public parks
captive and bright
and hung in their own
slow-burning
transitive gold;
jamjars of spawn
and sticklebacks
or goldfish carried home

from fairgrounds
to the hum of radio

but this is the problem: how to be alive
in all this gazed-upon and cherished world
and do no harm

a toddler on a beach
sifting wood and dried weed from the sand
and puzzled by the pattern on a shell

his parents on the dune slacks with a kite
plugged into the sky
all nerve and line

patient; afraid; but still, through everything
attentive to the irredeemable.

“His life’s work is like a dark, glittering, ethereal yet earthy river of thought, full of angels, ghosts, nocturnes, animals. These are books as brimming with spirit & light as they are with eroticism & violence”

—Seán Hewitt on John Burnside’s poetry & fiction

@bookstodon

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/11/where-to-start-with-john-burnside

#Scottish #literature #poetry #novel #JohnBurnside

It gets late early out here
in the lacklustre places,
wind in the trees and the foodstalls’
ricepaper lamplight, fading and blurred with rain…

—John Burnside, “Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012”
published in BLACK MIDDENS: New Writing Scotland 31 (ASL, 2013)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #JohnBurnside

John Burnside
Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012

“Necessity is not the mother of invention; play is”
—Ian D. Suttie

It gets late early out here
in the lacklustre places,
wind in the trees & the foodstalls’
ricepaper lamplight, fading & blurred with rain,
the wire fence studded with fleece
& indelible traces
of polythene wrapping; marrowfat clogging the drains
on the road that runs out to the coast
then disappears.
A last bleed of gold in the west, like a Shan Shui painting,
then darkness.

The animals are gone
that hunted here:
wolves coming down from the hills, that
immaculate hunger,
rumours of bear & cat, quick
martens & raptors.
The rain is darker now,
though not so black,
oil-iridescent, streaked with the smell of lard
– it gets late early out here; though late, out here,
has a different meaning:

stars in the road
& the absence of something more
than birchwoods or song,
pallet fires, tyre-tracks,
grubbed fields clouded with grease
& palm oil, hints
of molasses and lanolin, tarpaper,
iron filings.
A narrow band of weather on the road,
then houses; though we scarcely think of them
as that.

I remember a meadow at dusk
in another rain
(and this is nostalgia now); I remember
I stood in a wind like gossamer and watched
three roe fawns and a doe
come quietly, one by one, through the silvering grasses,
wary, but curious, giving me just enough space
to feel safe,
their watchfulness reminding me of something
lost, a creaturely
awareness I could only glimpse

in passing.
That meadow is gone, and dusk
isn’t dusk any more
– or not out here –
just miles of tract and lay-by on the way
to junkyards and dead allotments,
guard dogs on tether,
biomass, factory outlets,
the half-light of ersatz dairies petering out
on rotting fields
of rape and mustardseed.

We’ve been going at this for years:
a steady delete
of anything that tells us what we are,
a long
distaste for the blood warmth and bloom
of the creaturely: local
fauna and words for colour, all the shapes
of ritual and lust
surrendered where they fell, beneath a fog
of smut and grime and counting-house
as church, the old gods

buried undead beneath the rural sprawl
that bears their names, or wandering the hills
of Lammermuir and Whitelee, waiting out
the rule of Mammon, till the land returns
– with or without us –
chainlink going down
to bindweed, drunken
thistles in a sway
of wind and goldfinch on the dead estates, fat
clusters of moss
and gentian, broken

tarmac with new shoots
of coltsfoot breaking through
like velvet, till the darkness of the leaf
unfurls into a light we could have known
but failed to see
by choosing not to find
the kingdom-at-hand:
this order;
this dialectic;
this mother of invention,
ceaseless play.

“It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age, painfully alive to the glory of what we’re losing.”

—Sarah Crown reviews John Burnside’s posthumously published final poetry collection THE EMPIRE OF FORGETTING

@bookstodon

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/22/the-empire-of-forgetting-by-john-burnside-review-last-words-from-an-essential-poet-of-our-age

#Scottish #literature #contemporary #poetry #anthropocene #naturewriting #JohnBurnside

"Give me a little less
with every dawn."

Marjorie Lotfi performs John Burnside's "Prayer" in a film directed by Savannah Acquah, from a new series from the ‪Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation & the Writers’ Mosaic

https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/prayer

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #JohnBurnside

From the Scottish Poetry Library archives: poet & novelist John Burnside discusses fellow Scottish poet W.S. Graham. During the talk, recorded at the National Library of Scotland, Burnside talks about poetry & visual art, the poet as nomad, & “feeding the dead”

https://splpodcast.podbean.com/e/john-burnside-on-ws-graham

#Scottish #literature #poetry #visualart #poets #JohnBurnside #WSGraham

Had I been less prepared, I would have left
in springtime, when the plum tree in the yard
was still in bloom,
the windows open after months of snow,
one magpie in the road
and then another…

—John Burnside, “The Night Ferry”
published in the London Review of Books, December 2020

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n24/john-burnside/the-night-ferry

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #JohnBurnside

The Night Ferry
John Burnside

Had I been less prepared, I would have left
in springtime, when the plum tree in the yard
was still in bloom,
the windows open after months of snow,
one magpie in the road
and then another.

I could have slipped away, late afternoon,
while everyone was busy somewhere else,
the fish van at the corner, children
dawdling home from school
in twos and threes, a porch light
lit against the dusk on Tollbooth Wynd.

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to prow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.

Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself…

—John Burnside, “The Good Neighbour”
published in THE GOOD NEIGHBOUR (Cape, 2005)

Hear John Burnside read this poem on the Poetry Archive:
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/good-neighbour/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #JohnBurnside

The Good Neighbour
John Burnside

Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself.

I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him
walking to the fish-house, or the bank,
and yet I think of him, on nights like these,
waking alone in my own house, my other neighbours
quiet in their beds, like drowsing flies.

He watches what I watch, tastes what I taste:
on winter nights, the snow; in summer, sky.
He listens for the bird lines in the clouds
and, like that ghost companion in the old
explorers’ tales, that phantom in the sleet,
fifth in a party of four, he’s not quite there,
but not quite inexistent, nonetheless;

and when he lays his book down, checks the hour
and fills a kettle, something hooded stops
as cell by cell, a heartbeat at a time,
my one good neighbour sets himself aside,
and alters into someone I have known:
a passing stranger on the road to grief,
husband and father; rich man; poor man; thief.

“Borderlands are sites of mystery, but they are also theatres where, as often as not, tragedy unfolds… where the dead still linger and the living come, on special occasions, to grieve.”

—John Burnside, “Borderlands”

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2012/05/borderlands-by-john-burnside/

#Scottish #literature #essay #JohnBurnside #borderlands

“Scottishness is as much myth as it is history, which means that we must guard it carefully, retell it beautifully &, more than anything else, love it wisely.”

John Burnside (1955–2024) was born #OTD, 19 March. He published prolifically across many forms – chiefly as a poet, but also as a novelist, memoirist, writer of short stories & academic works – over a career spanning nearly forty years.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/07/in-search-of-a-homeland

#Scottish #literature #poetry #shortstories #novel #Burnside #JohnBurnside

We Are Blessed by the Dead: Remembering John Burnside

“I think John was drawn to that notion of a conjured charm or presence that came from the spirit-world, and he watched for it constantly, that liminal light. He told me once that poetry was, for him, a form of alchemy.”

—Robin Robertson reflects on the life & work of his friend, the poet & author John Burnside

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1658779/we-are-blessed-by-the-dead-remembering-john-burnside

#Scottish #literature #poetry #JohnBurnside

Today's poem:

At Notre Dame de Reims
- at John Burnside

https://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/767501164918013952/at-notre-dame-de-reims?source=share

#poetry #architecture #Reims #sculpture #stonemasonry #JohnBurnside #life #vitality #AncientGods #virility #christendom #control

A Celebration of John Burnside’s Life & Work
16 Oct, University of St Andrews

John Burnside was a poet, novelist, memoir & nature writer, & Professor of Creative Writing in the School of English at St Andrews.

The memorial service will take place in St Salvator’s Chapel & will be followed by a reception in Lower College Hall. All welcome.

#Scottish #literature #JohnBurnside #StAndrews

https://events.st-andrews.ac.uk/events/a-celebration-of-john-burnsides-life-and-work/

‘Last year John was awarded the David Cohen Prize, which recognises a lifetime’s achievement. Hugely deserved, but who knew his lifetime would so soon be over? His acceptance speech with readings, which is available to watch online, is profound. It is “wondrous and beauteous” – which is what he calls the world around us. It’s also funny, and elegiac.’

#Scottish #literature #poetry #JohnBurnside

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkz-BzEUUck

‘Like Rilke, John managed to be earthy while expanding our imaginative reach into the angelic orders. His poems acted on one like a drug, a substance in the bloodstream. One would struggle to say what they were “about”. Rather, one might emerge blinking and wondering, “Where have I just been?”’

—Kathleen Jamie on John Burnside

#Scottish #literature #poetry #JohnBurnside

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/06/john-burnsides-soul-music

John Burnside poems and books that celebrate his talent. The renowned poet passed away at the age of 69

"Flawed but fearless, fabulously gifted, he was a truly great writer."

#JohnBurnside #books #poems #poetry

https://howtobe247.com/john-burnside-poems-and-books-that-celebrate-his-talent/

Bob tro yn braf i weld rhywun yn canu clod i #JohnCowperPowys, ond yn well byth pan mae’n rhywun ti wedi mwynhau darllen eisioes.

Y bardd o'r Alban, #JohnBurnside ar y llyfrau sy wedi’i lunio.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/02/john-burnside-my-stoner-friends-were-into-the-hobbit-but-gormenghast-was-darker

Kennen wir uns schon?
EIN SOLO FÜR DIE PERLE!
JOHN BURNSIDE
So etwas wie Glück
Übers. Bernhard Robben

Gefeiert und bekannt für seine Romane ebenso wie für seine Lyrik, läuft der schottische Schriftsteller John Burnside hier, in seinen Erzählungen, zu Hochform auf.
Dort gehts zum Buch:
https://kurzelinks.de/xufl

#buch #penguinbooks #literatur #autor #fiktion #johnburnside #bernhardrobben #soetwaswieglück #perlendesmonats #karoviertel #sternschanze #stpauli #hamburg #codobuch #indiebuchhandel

Augen auf und vielleicht noch Brille auf für unsere neuen PERLEN DES MONATS! Alle fünf Perlen findet ihr bei uns vor Ort oder selbstverständlich auch in unserem Onlineshop. Link: https://kurzelinks.de/z7ja !

@hanserliteratur @rowohlt #lesen #bücher #buch #codobuch #buchhandel #indiebuchhandel #karoviertel #stpauli #hamburg #ausleseware #lesetipp #mareicekaiser #annafiske #johnvercher #breteastonellis #johnburnside #wieviel #theshards #wintersturm #soetwaswieglück #wieisteseigentlicherwachsenzusein

#johnburnside

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