John Burnside - Learning to Sleep

 John Burnside, Learning to Sleep (Cape)

John Burnside's new collection begins with the observation that,

Wooing is out of fashion,

like silence,

or manna 

 

no fervour any more, no

Tir na Nog.

 

and before the Postscript, it ends reflecting on David Hume and how, perhaps,

everything we know is what it seems.

In between those two empirical attitudes, though, that 'what we know' appears to suggest or contain a bit more. Postscript refers to the 'edge' and a 'brink',

as if a better world was still to come.

 

and elsewhere he has a 'cusp' and a 'horizon', or lack of one. Without wanting to sound too much like a poetry reviewer, it is that intersection between the actual and some potential beyond it that runs through the book. I don't imagine John Burnside to be a religious man or he would surely say so more explicitly but he needs quasi-religious ideas sometimes to express the idea. There must be more to it than meets the eye, he is trying to convince us, or convince himself, especially when, in A Brief Memo, for Valentine's Day, he senses,

            how sweet it is

to be alive.

 

That is the theme of the poetry and the poetry provides its own answer by being what it is. It is gorgeously done and entirely convincing despite the apparent ease with which such writing seems to come. There is no shortage of Burnside poetry and then there's the fiction and other prose but such facility doesn't seem to diminish the accomplishment. He hasn't wandered off into mythologies of his own making like some might say Ted Hughes did and he hasn't taken his method to the outer limits of arch-cleverness like Paul Muldoon, who continued from his pre-eminent position of sophistication twenty years ago into realms of his own making as if he were James Joyce.

Having posted the programme for the forthcoming year with Portsmouth Poetry Society only yesterday, I see I am down to introduce the subject of 'free verse' in February. I don't intend to either attack or defend the idea but to 'tell it how it is', for me at least, which may or may not gravitate towards a manifesto statement that there's no such thing. However, if one ever needed an example of a poet that writes 'free verse' than is undeniably 'poetry', I'm quite prepared to abandon Thom Gunn's Touch as my paragon example and replace it with almost anything from this book or elsewhere in John Burnside. Rhyme and metre, assumed by so many to be essential to 'poetry', would ruin the rhythms and progress of his language. It has an orderliness of its own. One couldn't call it verse but it isn't 'chopped-up prose'. As ever, all you have to be is any good.

 

Abundance, or at least the illusion of it, pours out of such regular experiences as loss, absence and isolation. From those first lines, from In Memoriam, in which 'there is a Meadow / - afterward', the world is charged with the likes of,

the murmur of stars in my blood

 

and the knowledge that,

so, now, there is no end

to what we know,

though what we know

is never quite enough

to set things right:        

and we recognize our unsafe place in the universe or at least have a good friend in John Burnside, or the words he threads together, to help soothe those agonies. And that is what he quotes from Thomas Carlyle ahead of Preparations for the True Apocalypse as,

 which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down.

It can happen in the rare beauty of such lines as those from An Angel Passes, 

                                   the light

re-spinstering your face

by slow degrees, your fingers

tangled in a myth of needlecraft 

 

but it happens more properly not in selected quotes but in the cumulative effect of the book as a whole.

 

Poetry isn't actually up to much these days when the real threat of climate apocalypse has been obscured by a couple of years of pandemic difficulty. John Burnside's poems are unlikely to save us because hardly anybody outside the small, closed poetry world has heard of him but that doesn't mean a few of us aren't glad of knowing we are not alone. It's very unlikely I'll see a better book of new poems than this this year and, alongside the music and, let's hope, some great Autumn concerts, it's a highlight of 2021.