Tom Branfoot

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‘Everything Shapes What It Encounters’: On the Life and Work of John Burnside

I heard about the passing of John Burnside while at work. I was stood in the same shop where I learnt that our beloved Gboyega Odubanjo had died. The market-economy of language is immediately emptied of any pretence in moments like this. It becomes effortful to communicate in the damaged language of commerce, lacking meaningful tenor. Burnside’s death was particularly unexpected weeks after the publication of his new volume Ruin, Blossom (Cape, 2024) — released without fanfare — and after being awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2023 for his beglamoured, wild and lyrical corpus.

Born in 1955 in Dunfermline, Fife, Burnside grew up in Corby, Northamptonshire, an industrial boom town where his father worked as a seasonal labourer. Corby was a bleak New Town known for its steelworks, in which Burnside developed an anarchic outsiderness, ‘the group, whatever form it took, was an instrument of tyranny’. In opposition to the forests and wetlands of Cowdenbeath, Corby was ‘hideously ugly…’:

All it amounted to was a cluster of cheap housing estates clinging like barnacles to the behemoth of Stewart’s and Lloyd’s; huddled and polluted, it befouled the Northamptonshire countryside like some medieval plague town wrapped in a grey-gold cloud of smoke and smuts and simmering in the orange glow from the blast furnaces (A Lie About My Father, 2007).

After spending the ‘first four years’ of his life as ‘an unsocialised, neutral creature’ in a ‘near-pagan existence, confined to the backyards and drying greens of various tenements’, Corby was Burnside’s induction to the administered, workaday life, governed by the institutions of church, family and marriage. Yet, these unpresuming and lacklustre places offer moments of escape, not by leaving for greater things, but in moments where the self and other meet, disperse, and blend:

The village is over there, in a pool of bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire (‘Halloween’).

Interstitial zones are spaces of intrigue and glamourie, ‘magical spaces where anything can occur… the locus of transformation’ (‘Poetry and A Sense of Place’, 1997). In I Put a Spell On You (Vintage, 2014), he praises the pull from ‘the dark end of the fair’, in ‘An Essay Concerning Light’, the speaker drives past houses lit ‘television blue, a constant flicker, like the run of thought that keeps us from ourselves’, in ‘Halloween’, they ‘walked the boundaries of ice and bone / where the parish returns to itself / in a flurry of snow’.

Clusters of glistering images construct these imagined, yet ordinary places, between wild and administered domains, visited throughout his work: ‘fox bones and knuckles of coal’ (‘The Pit Town in Winter’), ‘musk and terror’ (‘The Fair Chase’), ‘dusk and fur’ (‘The Price of Sand’), ‘adder’s tooth / and cullet in the grass’ (‘Flowering Currants’). Lists carry an evocative element of prayer, like litanies, they construct worlds, shift and develop meaning, and bring us closer to the hereafter, or everafter, concepts that run through his work.

Interfacing between worlds, realms and zones is a deeply ecological method of suggesting our interdependence with other lifeforms. ‘Everything / shapes what it encounters’, he writes in ‘Instructions for a Sky Burial’. Reading this poem on the day of his death, I am struck by his intimacy with mortality, a knowledge of animal violence and a sober acceptance of human decay that affords life meaning.

They say the dead still listen for a time
before they leave for good, the spirit
sifting away in the wind, or salting the grass
for the life of the world to come.
Maybe it’s this that decides
the new beginning, someone
coming across a field
at evening, birdsong
high in the trees, or the first dark spots
of rain in a stand of nettles: everything
shapes what it encounters
[…] So when that day arrives
when I shall die,
carry me out of the house, unwashed and naked,
and leave me in the open, where the crows
can find me,
dogs, if there are dogs — there will be rats,
but let them eat their fill, so what they leave
can blend into the soil
more easily.

A quintessential passage from a poem commencing with the speaker encountering a roadkill coyote (‘eye-sockets / hollow, the viscera / scraped from the crib of bone’) seamlessly melding into an evocation of interconnectedness. Tibetan sky burials serve as ecological rituals, recycling nutrients and sustaining symbiotic systems. Our encounters with art shape our own sensibilities as much as encounters with otherness sculpt our sense of personhood. Diverse philosophical and religious concepts mingle harmoniously, Zen oneness and Catholicism, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’.

As an undergraduate, who grew up working-class and Catholic in a post-industrial, northern nothing-town, when a friend introduced me to Black Cat Bone (Cape, 2011), I was hooked. This was the work I wanted to write, interfacing between the living world and the spirit realm, industry and wilderness, desire and fulfilment, ritual and sacrament with lyric intensity and a soft, controlled register. Tension between modern flux and ‘an old belonging’ (‘Bird Nest Bound’) is rife in this collection, reminding us of our creaturely nature within an exceedingly technological present — something he was acutely aware of having worked as a software engineer for ten years. That we are flesh and bone and will return to the soil to feed new life; ‘new life blooms from the ruins’, reads the Schiller epigraph in his last work, Ruin, Blossom.

Halloween, in his symbolic order, is a perennial reminder of porosity between places and states:

Most years, if I can, I stay at home… I think of my own dead, out there among the millions of returning souls permitted, for this once night, to visit the places they once knew, the houses they inhabited, the streets they crossed on their way to work… the living spend this day building fires… the purpose [of which] is to light the way, and to offer a little warmth to ghosts who are so like ourselves that we are interchangeable: living and dead; guest and host; householder and spectre; my father, myself (A Lie About My Father).

A critique of his work I have met — this imprecision and vagueness of his subject — is among his strongest attributes. Few writers can convey negative capability with such taut, lyrical precision, ‘something only half- / imagined, and more gift / than I can say’, he writes of an injured goldfinch (‘Alcools’). Foxes, owls, snakes, these are not creatures which linger, they exist — at least in our cognitive and sensory comprehension — as glimpses, sheens of fur and feather surpassing our vision. This is animal behaviour, wild things do not stay prone for our study, neither do spectres or apparitions. There is ‘one rule, here’, he writes, ‘that no one leaves until the creaturely / in everything is sifted from his skin’ (‘Creaturely’). The creaturely is part of the everyday, it has not been destroyed completely by exploitative practices of property ownership, extractive capitalism, and modernisation. Throughout his corpus are glimpsed things ‘not quite discerned, / not quite discernible: a mouth, then eyes, then nothing’, creatures, ghosts, pagan gods, ‘a phantom thing, betrayed by smoke or rain’ (‘The Fair Chase’). I admire his allegiance to ephemerality rather than sustained study of a subject. Burnside doesn’t maim the subject, trapping it with a taxidermic intent. His poems are like Halloween, spaces for mourning, where boundaries are porous between the self and other, animal and afterlife.

In The Asylum Dance (Cape, 2000), written after moving back to Fife, Burnside incorporated white space, expressive lineation and formal experimentation into his practice, recalibrating approaches to writing about place and environment. The opening poem ‘Ports’ contains an archive of place:

spring water mingles with salt
………………………….beneath the church
where Anstruther’s dead
………………………….are harboured in silent loam;
sea-litter washes the wall where the graveyard ends
a scatter of shells and hairweed
………………………….and pebbles of glass
made smooth
………..in the sway of the tide

A literal place of soil and sand where the dead and living commune, where the afterlife of single-use plastic — something made from natural materials to be indestructible — haunt our shores, at the boundary between ocean and land. This collection is preoccupied with dwelling, belonging and notions of home. ‘The enterprise of the lyric, in fact, is to identify home’, he writes in ‘Poetry and A Sense of Place’; his poetry enacts and represents place through detail, according with Aristotle’s theory that universals must be instantiated.

In ‘A Winter Mind’ (2013), an essay published by London Review of Books, he writes about Flemish painting and how historical reality undercut an emancipatory sense he held of winter landscapes:

Instead of offering a vision of equality, as in the Dutch paintings, or the snowy days of my small-town childhood, the frost fairs symbolised all that was wrong with a nation that would be responsible for the Acts of Enclosure and the Highland Clearances, the privatisation of the water in our rivers and even of the wind that blows across our neonicitinoid-drenched fields.

For the uninitiated, his sensorial lyric style could eclipse the political import of his writing and thought. Enclosure destroys the common, one of many processes in the dissolution of community and our symbiotic, conservational relationship with the natural world. An early move toward the commodification of animals, land and space, removing us from the essential connections our ancestors held with water, landscapes and creatures, allowing pollution and destruction through the language of law:

We’ve been going at this for years:
a steady delete
of anything that tells us what we are,
a long
distaste for the blood warmth and bloom
of the creaturely (‘Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012’).

Loss is present in language, environment, species, and communities, stemming from an anthropocentric, white, Western, masculinist hierarchy which has warped and severed our connections to humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans.

Ruin, Blossom, his latest and last collection maintains his idiosyncratic concerns, formal habits, and lyric grace, yet is suffused with decay and destruction, of his illness and aging body, political ruin, and environmental damage. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Burnside was admitted to hospital due to heart failure hallucinating bats during a near-death experience. His previous collection Learning to Sleep (Cape, 2021) approaches insomnia and illness, which I see as a companion piece to Ruin, Blossom.

‘Litha’ ends with these lines:

nothing to reveal, beyond the hum
of incarnation:
sun on the backlot, mayweed, that clinging smell

of bird rot in the grass, like
angel spoor. How sweetness is always
ruin. No

Hereafter. Always now.

Approaching its end, the syntax becomes disjointed, heavy enjambment creates multiple meanings whereby sweetness is eternal and ruin, and where hereafter is abolished by the act of reading. Reading Burnside’s work reanimates his spirit in the continual present of the poem. As he writes in The Music of Time (Profile Books, 2019), ‘to make a poem at all is an act of hope’, for a future in which somebody is present, attending to the music and the craft.
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Tom Branfoot is the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral and a recipient of the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023.