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The text: Aislinn Hunter introducing
John Burnside
I first discovered John Burnside's poetry the
way most poets discover other writers: in the form of a slim volume
sitting on a crammed bookshelf in a good bookstore.
First of all I liked the title of the book (The Light Trap)
and the look of the font. I also liked the author's name: it seemed
warm and somehow familial. I pulled the book out, opened it up
and read a few lines. There it was: a sense of travel, of being
Elsewhere, of seeing another world as no one, save John Burnside,
has ever seen it. Who in Canada would write, as Burnside does in Common
Knowledge, of 'The classes of jamjars. Subtleties of string'?
Of 'tubers locked in bottles, sprouting wings'? No one I
knew of. But more than that, more than the specifics of language
and place, Burnside was good: a good philosopher and a good technician;
a rigorous examiner of the common and the ephemeral; of the seemingly
insignificant and the large.
Born in Fife in 1955, John Burnside is the author of nine collections
of poetry, five books of fiction and a memoir, A Lie About My
Father, published by Jonathan Cape this year. He's often regarded
as a nature poet, an 'outdoors' writer, but his subject matter
is also the quiet contemplation of houses viewed from the street
or lives revealed through the local record of community. 'We
used to walk in the suburbs, spying into the houses of people we
imagined were rich: interiors of perfect stillness, unbearably
tidy…'.
Burnside's poetry is taut and well constructed but the subject
matter is not tidy. His writing is part lyric philosophy part narrative
study. His terrain is that of the jutting image, the quick surprise.
He is part magician and part attentive observer: the man in the
first row watching the world's sleight of hand, that shift and
change which is transmogrification and perception. He is the eyewitness
who slows the story down to reveal shifts inside of shifts, tricks
within tricks while never losing sight of the wonder.
I thought of Burnside's poetry again last November. I was walking
the riverside through Dean village in Edinburgh and thinking I'd
look for more of his books while I was in Scotland. The day was
crisp and sunny, the pathway muddy and lightly rimmed with frost.
I'd walk five minutes without seeing anyone and then intermittently
a solitary walker or a couple with wet and steaming dogs would
walk by. On one of the quiet stretches I looked down towards the
underbrush. For an instant I thought I saw something in the foliage.
Well, that's not true: I knew there was nothing in there – the
leaves hadn't moved, there was no sound, nothing to draw my attention – but
the play of light on the surface leaves and the depth of the greenery
made me feel that something could be in there, that it was possible
there was more there than met the eye.
I remember thinking that only a landscape with this light, this
kind of bundled up shadow could give birth to writers like Robert
Louis Stevenson and James Barrie: writers of altered states, of
transformation. Burnside's work, like the Scottish landscape, has
this quality. It is full of sudden changes, tricks of light and
slant perception. His language reflects this, images often work
as hinges: headlamps are headlamps but then become, in an instant,
the eyes of a dreamer. Things change, take on new forms but Burnside
retains his distance, writing from the intersection between the
magical and the everyday, exploring the interstitial with a mix
of devotion and bemusement. Sometimes he's with us, pointing down
the road or back into memory, standing 'at the edge of the woods
on Fulford Road / my mind on the blue of elsewhere…'
and sometimes he's away 'along the empty road, / like someone
taken in a fairy tale…'. But regardless of where he goes
we follow his thinking, happy to arrive with him in places both
familiar and strange.
Burnside's poetry is rich with detail: the uncanny: 'a veil
of silt and linnet bones' and the oft overlooked: 'rooms
above the business of the garden'. One of his strengths is
his attention to cadence, to the resonant in both sound and image.
In one poem, the dead on Halloween gather by the harbour, 'their
eyes like the eyes of seals, their faces / meltwater blue, as
if they had surfaced through ice…'. Burnside's work
first appealed to me because it was imaginative, because I am
a writer obsessed with pinning things down and because Burnside
is willing to live in the terrain of 'sometimes' of 'incandescence'
'ambiguity' and wonder. As he says in the poem 'Koi', 'it's
not the thing itself / but where it stands / ––
the shadows fanned / or dripping from a leaf / the gap between
each named form and the next…'. In the poem 'History'
Burnside writes of 'shifts of light / and weather / and the
quiet, local forms / of history…'. This is his terrain
and it is one I've never encountered anywhere else. Striking and
imaginative, this is the work of a writer in his prime.
  
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