Books of the Month

'Selected Poems' by John Burnside

AUGUST 2006

You'll find a great introduction to some fifteen years worth of finely tuned poetry in the new Selected John Burnside. Fascinated by the half-states between being and non-being, the hidden and the revealed, the private and the public, Burnside's is a subtle poetry which comes as close as you're likely to get to putting a finger on the intangible.

Burnside has always been fascinated by nature, and there are wonderful observations in '8am near Chilworth', 'Koi' and 'Animals'. He becomes a poet of place most obviously in the 2000 collection The Asylum Dance (for which he won the Whitbread Poetry Award), which features deft sequences of poems about 'Ports', 'Settlements', 'Fields' and 'Roads'. My favourite is the title poem itself though, a semi-mysterious recreation of an annual dance held at the local asylum, the one night in the year when the patients and the local residents would come together:

All afternoon we picnicked on the lawn

then danced in awkward couples to the hiss

of gramophones, as daylight turned to dusk;

a subtle exchange in the half-light; acts of grace

[...]

Beside the patients, we were lithe and calm:

we doled out charity and easy praise

and waited for the dancing to erase

the pain in the knot of the throat

Burnside also frequently revisits the idea of home. His poems are full of going-out-and-returnings, and of neighbours. 'A Normal Skin' and 'The Good Neighbour', for instance, are imaginings of people sat in houses like ours, within metres of our own, with similar - or wildly different - lives and feelings.

This is an ideal place to start if you haven't read Burnside's poetry before. He also writes good novels too. Find out more at the Contemporary Writers website.

Susan Tranter

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