By Toh Hsien Min

For all the supposed convenience of online bookshops, I still like visiting physical bookshops and thumbing my way through a dozen books before settling on those to leave with.  In Singapore, this has narrowed to just Kinokuniya, so one of my highlights of a trip to London, or better yet Oxford, is to stop in at Blackwell's to pick out poetry by sampling.  Mainly I catch up on the latest releases by the likes of Muldoon, Oswald and co.  The last time I was in Oxford, a few years ago now, I was shocked to find that the Blackwell's poetry section contained no John Burnside.  Had he been cancelled, or had all his books sold out?

Oxford was where I first met Burnside.  Though I was documenting much of my experience then, I have no record of it beyond the Oxford University Poetry Society calendar of events.  The date was 18 Nov 1998, the event was a joint reading by Robin Robertson and Burnside, who had just released A Normal Skin (1997), and the venue was the New College Long Room, but my diary page for the day is blank.  Subsequently Burnside visited Singapore in 2013; this time along with my QLRS co-conspirators I took him to Taste at Ibis on Bencoolen Road, then a great place to offer overseas visitors the savour of local favourites in air-conditioned comfort.  We probably had chilli crab, fried kway teow, and satay, but again I have no record of it beyond a single photograph of his lecture and autographed copies of his books.  He was back in Singapore in 2018, and this time I think we went to drinks.  More autographed books.  No photograph.  There is a surprising amount of absence in my interactions with Burnside, but perhaps this is proportionate to the surprising amount of absence in and around his work also.  For me, Burnside was like Sergio Agüero as Manchester City's main striker – so good at what he quietly did that he was always overlooked.  So when I learned in May of the passing of John Burnside, I felt, as one of his poetic personas faced with the new absence of a new death, "at the quiet limit of my world".

Like Agüero, Burnside could dazzle his reader in so many ways as he hunted down his goals in almost twenty poetry collections (plus several novels to boot).  For a start, his writing has the knack of drawing equivalence of things that are just plausible and yet completely unfamiliar.  In the titular poem of The Hunt in the Forest (2009), Burnside writes that "How children think of death is how the shadows / gather between the trees" [emphasis mine], and while the concept itself is striking and instantly memorable, there is equivalence on a deeper level that is "at the meeting of parallel lines", at once paradoxical and convergent.  It is suggestive of hunting and also of writing itself, drawing a further equivalence:

they never quite arrive at what they seem,
leaving a turn of phrase or a song from childhood
deep in the forest, bent to the juddering kill
and waiting, while their knives slip through the blood
like butter, or silk, until the heart is still.

While the "juddering kill" here does echo in "pigsqueal and judder" in 'In Memoriam', the real connection is with an even later poem also strongly redolent of remembrance, titled 'Poppy Day', which has another butchering:

        Barely a shudder rises through the hand
that holds the blade
                                   and yet he guides it down
so gently, it falls opens, like a flower.

And still the children come, to hear him sing,
his voice so soft, it's no more than a whisper.

The Burnside song is itself no more than a whisper.  Yet that improbable "meeting of parallel lines" also points to a skill in which he had few peers.  Poetry may be said to consist in the treading of a fine line between the rhythms of quotidian language and the rhythms of song.  This is particularly important when more than ever contemporary poetry seeks to embrace yet subvert the ordinary by amplifying (often irrelevant) specificity: as Burnside parodies in 'The Day Etta Died', that's not dancing with a girl at a party, that's "the cold December night / I slow-danced with Annabelle Gray to 'I'd Rather Go Blind' / at the Catholic Club Xmas Party".  As this might suggest, Burnside's exemplary treading of the line consists not so much in virtuosity of diction.  The mere selection of le mot juste isn't that hard; every writer practices this with every piece of writing.  What makes poetry hard is what makes poetry poetry in the first place: in other words, the line-break.  So much of what passes for poetry today reads like chopped-up prose, but before the age of paper and the printing press, the recording technology of poetry was its prosody: the patterns of sound and rhythm that gave birth to the line break, and not the other way around.  For instance, in Beowulf what are now taken to be its lines are inferred from its alliterative metre.

The line that John Burnside treads is the line of the line-break.

What is the quality of the Burnside line?  For me, it is the perfection of cadence allied with the shaping of the emphasis in the line.  It is the musical phrase, with the notes defined by the quantity of breath used up by the phrase and by when and how the pauses occur.  In 'Responses to Augustine of Hippo', from Gift Songs (2007):

I wonder how we know the things we know
most surely
              with no hope of evidence
and lacking a faith
              that might extend to heaven

the line-breaking not only imbues "most surely" with the weight of a semibreve followed by two minims (or a spondee followed by a trochee), it also connects the adverb distinctly yet simultaneously with the lines before and after: "the things we know / most surely" as well as "most surely / with no hope of evidence".

The Asylum Dance (2000) may be the peak of Burnside's virtuoso line-breaking, mainly because in breaking with vertical drops and horizontal continuity he discovers a decomposition of the line into units and sub-units, whose individual weights have to be tested constantly:

How everyone expects
that moment when a borrowed motor stalls
half-way across the channel
                                                   and you sit
quiet
          amazed by the light
                                        aware
of everything
                    aware of shoals and stars
shifting around you
                            endlessly

entwined.

The stillness of the single-word sub-lines in the middle is broken by the reflexive, Russian-dolled repetition of "aware" moving into an alliterative shimmer, until that weighty pause at the end, holding back the payoff. 

Elsewhere, in 'Roads', Burnside's line-breaking goes beyond just enacting its own subject, with the pause of "Stop moving" kicking off "and another life begins", and into physically painting the shape of the tide whitely bubbling a jagged wash over sand:

Stop moving
                   and another life begins:
the motion the tide conceals
                                          the caress of erosion
or how the beginning of autumn is quietly gloved
in August

While Burnside's poetry stands up well to being inspected at the micro-linear level, these lines build, fractally, into lengthy poems spreading over twenty pages at a time, shaped by sub-poems just as with sub-lines; and then into integral collections with the ebbs and flows of sub-collections, such that when Burnside titles a book All One Breath (2014) it is hard not to apply this simultaneously at the level of the line circumscribed by the breath and at all the structural units contained within it.  There it is almost impossible to be definitive on whether 'Self Portrait As Funhouse Mirror' is a section in the book containing ten poems or a single long poem, distinguished from the other sections of the book by a numbering of its sub-parts.  In setting up numerous connections between the poems through the motif of mirrors, Burnside creates exactly the house of mirrors referenced by his title.  The excellent 'VI. A Rival' ("I catch a passing glimpse of someone new") links to 'VII. Self Portrait As A Picture Window' ("or, better, that it isn't me at all") then to 'VIII. A Couple' ("so when you catch me looking through the mirror / at someone other than the self you are") and 'X. Spiegelkabinett, Berlin, 2012' ("though I'm smiling, what I think he sees…"), so that the multiple mirrors not only change points of view but indeed change what is being looked at such that the poet becomes "fearful of the image in the glass".

In Still Life with Feeding Snake (2017), Burnside extends this to an incredible feat of exploring infant mortality through Russian cosmonauts in a constellation of poems across the book.  This is as far away from the sterile miniature lyric that dominates contemporary poetry as it is possible to get; indeed it may be revealing that his least adventurous book during this rich vein of form in the 2000s and 2010s, Black Cat Bone (2011), was the one to simultaneously win the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize.  There the main nod to the complex patterning of his other books is in the way his opening poem 'The Fair Chase' carries on the imagery of The Hunt in the Forest, and perhaps also in how the collection wraps shoulders with the collections before and since in a crescendo of the consciousness of mortality.  Yet, in also being not recognisably epic, Burnside's poetry opens up the space for a mode of poetry in between, that brings all the tentative, exploratory yet sustained thoughtfulness of an essay to the oblique beauty that poetry is capable of. 

As the title poem of Still Life with Feeding Snake proposes: "(the basic things / are hardest to perfect)"; but in perfecting the basic things and generalising them into a sensitivity of the interaction of all the parts of poetry with its interstices, Burnside has left behind a corpus of poetry that is truly extraordinary.

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