John Burnside might appear to have more poetry titles to his name than is polite, and that is betting without the novels and memoirs, but I wouldn't be buying them in recent years if I didn't regard them as good bets, much safer than so many of this week's misdirected plunges at Cheltenham.
These poems work together, sharing their blue, their crimson, their recurring ways of illuminating life through an almost morbid fixation with death and, repeatedly, images of snow, snow, thick, thick snow. He either lives somewhere that gets more snow than most places or it is only when it snows that he is prompted to pour out poetry in his finely-crafted long sentences that make profound-sounding music within ostensibly loose free verse forms.
The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In is the first of many narratives but, in it, the gift of new sight to a man born blind does not provide the astonishment and appreciation that one might expect. As in Andre Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale, it is not as simple as that and the world he sees is a disappointment so that he sometimes is found wearing,
a makeshift
blindfold, just to have the darkness back
but he becomes reconciled to,
all he has
to keep his place
in this life, which is not the gift he sought
and he thus 'loves it', which is where we surely all find ourselves, like George Eliot's characters or Mr. Bleaney, relieved of all expectations of anything better.
In Sirens, the contingency of fragile lives is depicted in the death of a motorcyclist in a childhood memory who,
Slowly, it seemed,
he faded like a stain
but we must not mistake Burnside's description of a lost life here as any devaluing of it as anything so ordinary. Much more than that, it puts that life in a context of much vaster forces and is aware of each life's very minor significance because the boy finds, as he
thought of him as a gift, his eyes dimming out
as I watched, at the quiet limit of my world,
a kinship of sorts between us.
Blue draws explicit parallels between an older brother who died in childbirth, his own survival of a birth that could have been the same and the first acknowledged deaths of Russian cosmonauts in space, although it isn't known how many had previously been sent up into space by the Soviet Union space programme had been lost and their lost supressed. It is a poem of great restrained power and bleak beauty,
their deaths became another form
of saintliness, a charm against the flesh
the martyrs of my schoolbooks would have relished.
Throughout the book, the world is apprehended through unworldly encounters, like voices heard, stories unfolding from sensory perceptions to different definitions or, in the death of his grandmother,
as if she had just that moment understood
there was nowhere to go
but out through a gap
in the fabric of all she knew
But, beyond these longer meditations that extend from circumstances or narrative into a reflection back onto what being might mean, Mistaken for a Unicorn defies interpretation (for me, at least) and makes rare music rom its shifts of allusion. I'm not sure quite where we are and might have to find John Burnside's e-mail address to ask him but perhaps I'd prefer not to know and continue to re-read these tenuous lines for all their hints of meaning and what, for want of a better word, must be 'poetry'.
There is, perhaps, more than we need of it. John Burnside has a facility that almost defeats the object and shows so much that one begins to suspect one might eventually see how it is done, which is what happened with Paul Muldoon's last book.
For those of us who don't believe in magic, we think that it is just words and if they come so readily, there must be a trick to it and we are not inclined to be taken in like an audience of Uri Geller's. Because, eventually, we now might think, anything miraculous must be explainable. There might be no such thing as poetry and one day we'll know why. But until such a time, if Simon Armitage can occupy the space of workmanlike, respectable and very honourable poet, John Burnside is exploring somewhere beyond very convincingly.
I can't unravel how he does what he does and would prefer to admire it as much as I do than ever find out.
