| John Burnside introducing Aislinn Hunter
Scottish writer
John Burnside introduces the Canadian poet Aislinn Hunter
John Burnside (Scotland)
John Burnside was born in 1955 and now lives in Fife. He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently The Good Neighbour (Jonathan Cape, 2005) and Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 2006). His seventh collection, The Asylum Dance, won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prize. He has also published five works of fiction, including, most recently, Living Nowhere (2004), and the memoir A Lie About My Father (2006).
…introducing Aislinn Hunter (Canada)
 There is a poem of Aislinn Hunter's entitled 'Everything Lost is Found Again' that is both short enough, and deceptively simple enough for me to quote here in its entirety:
the ring that lay for months behind the
dresser,
the book finally returned by a friend,
apples
reborn in the boughs of an old tree
and the years appearing suddenly
ripe fruit in the
open hand.
The brevity of this poem is important, because it highlights Aislinn Hunter's gift for poetic economy (which is not to say that her poems are always short; rather, that she is one of those poets who has an uncanny ability to say exactly as much as she wants with the most economical of means). What matters more, however, is the deceptive simplicity: Hunter is forever taking us into what we think of as familiar territory - whether it be familiar images, familiar ideas, seemingly well-worn philosophical notions - and revealing what was missed, in all that supposed familiarity: what we took for granted, what we didn't want to acknowledge, or even - as in this poem - what we gave up on too soon.
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Read more by John Burnside on Aislinn Hunter
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