John Burnside teaches at St Andrews. His poetry collections include Feast Days (1992), The Asylum Dance (2000) and Black Cat Bone (2011), which won both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He has also written several novels, two collections of short stories and three books of memoir, parts of which were first published in the LRB.
God answers our prayers by refusing them.
Luther
I A Place by the SeaBecause what we think of as home is a hazard to others, our shorelines edged with rocks and shallow sandbanks reefs where navigation fails
we mark the harbour out with lights and noise: flickers of green and scarlet in the dark...
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Edvard Munch
I LandfillIn ways the dead are laid or how they come to lie I recognise myself...
Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78)
Weeks out of school: in rainstorms and grandmothers’ cupboards, bear-dark in the corners, filigrees of lacewing and silt;
the birds we saw in books: merganser, stork; trees from botanic gardens printed on air; the words in our minds like games that would never be finished: names for moments at sea; or how a skin
is altered by a history of shade: the...
Although it sets out to explore the lives of Fred and Rosemary West – along with Peter Sutcliffe, the most notorious figures in recent British criminal history – Happy like Murderers reads more like a novel than a documentary. In this respect, it recalls Truman Capote’s ‘novel of fact’, In Cold Blood, which made compelling fiction out of the brutal and senseless murder of an apparently typical American family in rural Kansas, and created a new genre on the way. ‘Brutal’ and ‘senseless’ are, of course, the terms customarily used to describe such crimes, part of the mechanism by which a society distances itself from the horror it discovers in its midst; the most common epithets for the perpetrators are ‘monster’ and ‘madman’.’‘
But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go.
Lennon-McCartney
I Driving to MirtiotissaWe learned to avoid the village to drive through the olive groves...
The lie is told to a man he meets on the road; it is America, fall, the mid-1990s, when he stops to pick up a hitch-hiker in Upper New York State. It is almost the day of the dead, and he is tired,...
A recent newspaper story told of a young man who went to hospital, seeking attention for stomach pains. Expecting to find some sort of cyst, the doctors opened him up. What they removed instead...
‘Fin de siècle’: the term suggests a dilution and dispersal of the cultural, social and political energies of a century, an uneasy time of uncertainties as a new era waits to be...
Whole systems of thought have been founded on the French language’s inability to distinguish differing from deferring. Perhaps Napoleon is to blame (‘Not tonight, Josephine’)....
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