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.
When we’re apart I imagine us in Japan, two hundred years ago, behind a screen, or watching the snow from the yawn of a paper room, the lovers in some shunga by Harunobu. It’s that formality we sometimes need to feed desire: intimate, yet giving in to light and shadow, allowing the other space to be intact and seen, like the single pine in a yard of gravel, revealed by the...
I want to begin again, climbing through beech roots and gulls to the hill of the fairies,
to nest with the rooks, to sleep amongst broken yews, to crouch in the dark of the ice house, close to the stone;
I’ll come after dark and feel the wet drift of their bodies, they’ll share me with the foxes and the deer,
or borrow my human warmth to weave a caul for the child they have stolen
...
As dawn moves in from the firth I’m sitting up awake, a mug of tea fogging the window, the bones of my hands and face shot with insomnia’s delicate, lukewarm needles. You’re still asleep. Your hair is the colour of whey and your hand on the pillow is clenched, like a baby’s fist on a figment of heat, or whatever you’ve clutched in a dream, and I...
Remembering the story of a man who left the village one bright afternoon, wandering out in his shirt-sleeves and never returning, I walk in this blur of heat to the harbour wall, and sit with my hands in my pockets, gazing back at painted houses, shopfronts, narrow roofs, people about their business, neighbours, tourists, the gaunt men loading boats with lobster creels, women in hats and...
Pas de port. Ports inconnus.
Henri Michaux
I HavenOur dwelling place: the light above the firth;
shipping forecasts; gossip; theorems;
the choice of a single word, to describe the gun-metal grey of the sky, as the...
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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