John Burnside - Ruin, Blossom

 John Burnside - Ruin, Blossom (Cape)

What I hadn't realized when finding out that John Burnside had died was that there had so recently been a further book of poems. Such a leavetaking seems almost too appropriate, his poems having long inhabited a region that isn't this world but can't believe in the mysticism his words evoke to think there is any other.

The words 'snow', stars' and 'shadow' recur regularly throughout Ruin, Blossom. Burnside would never have been anything quite so prescribed or prosaic as a mere 'symbolist' but those words insist on being noticed and so invite interpretation. In the first section, Apostasy, we have to take its title as a hint and a shift from the language and rituals of Christianity to the deeper, more natural Paganism might be an idea. The snow is often melting to reveal what was beneath it, as if the world was being divested of its lustrous covering to show what was beneath it. But that is far too superficial a reading to suffice as anything like the whole story.

Some poetry collections are so loosely themed that what the poems have in common is that they are those the poet has written since their last book whereas others, like this, ask to be read in relation to each other. One can make the 'shadows' into doubt and the 'stars' into eternity, fate or revelation but poetry worth its while benefits from not being having meaning pinned quite so firmly on it. It's possible that some poets might not be aware of how often certain words occur in their work and they are subconsciously revealed by their 'semantic fields' but it's unlikely that John Burnside and his editor didn't notice such topography.

The poem Apostasy begins,

At one time,

when there might have been a God,

before being illuminated by 'the sway of matter and a hint/ of distance',

in Bedlam Variations,

      all our gods have vanished from this house

and,

No one believes in heaven anymore

and we can take the hint that Burnside is celebrating something more vital and luminous,

things seen, as I am seen, and things unseen,

absolved of what I once mistook for rapture 

or,

      like forgiveness for the sin 

of being, but not being what was asked.

Those in Bedlam have a more acute insight into the unfathomable like the epigraph from Corinthians 2 where 'the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal'.

 

I'm often suspicious of poems that regard themselves as so 'free' that they can leave one word to a line or spread fragments of lines across the page. I'm not convinced it's much more than affectation but John Burnside has an innate music and seriousness that convinces above and beyond recondite typographical effects. Free verse can still be verse when generating authority enough not to divert attention to its formal niceties but it needs to be doing that first, not hoping that dispensing with ostensible form and metre somehow is its own justification.

While looking as if it is at least flirting with mysticism and 'the great beyond', Burnside's poetry was dealing with someting very real, something that led Carol Ann Duffy to suggest that poetry was 'the music of being human'. I was reluctant to give any credence to what sounded nice but didn't mean much but John Burnside might have provided her with what she meant, or me with a clue to what she meant, by it.