Where to start with: John Burnside

The Guardian

2 days ago

John Burnside was one of those rare prolific writers whose quality and care was not diminished by the apparent ease with which words arrived. His life's work is like a dark, glittering, ethereal yet earthy river of thought, full of angels, ghosts, nocturnes, animals. These are books as brimming with spirit and light as they are with eroticism and violence. If there is one word I would use to summarise Burnside's work, it's grace. He was a graceful writer, in terms of his elegance, but also one concerned with redemption and the moments of light that emerge from sorrow and great pain.
Burnside died in 2024 at the age of 69, not long after being awarded the David Cohen prize for literature, an award that recognises a lifetime's achievement. Before that, he had won just about every award going in the poetry world: the Forward prize, the TS Eliot prize and the Whitbread book award among them.
Though Burnside was best known as a poet, he wrote novels, memoir and literary history, too. If the dark places of the human experience attract you, you're in luck; but if not, don't be put off. Burnside is also a writer of warmth, humour and deep humanity.
Waking Up in Toytown is the second in Burnside's trio of memoirs. Disquieting, lyrical and precise, it covers alcoholism, madness, self-destruction, the search for normality and being 'a full-scale lunatic'. Burnside also writes about the seductiveness of darkness and oblivion, the vertigo of falling in love, the strange sensation of hearing voices, of seeing things. But all the while this is a deep, philosophical book about lives falling apart and being re-made. It is rich in language, hypnotic in its logic, utterly captivating in its vision of brokenness and redemption.
Burnside wrote 11 novels. If you were to pick up one, I'd recommend Glister. It's like a series of True Detective set in a post-industrial Scottish village, where a disused chemical factory has poisoned the landscape. As boys go missing in the poisoned woods year after year, the novel charts a disturbing path rich with mystery, unafraid of exploring the violence we commit against each other and against the planet. Chilling and completely compelling.
If you want to head straight for the masterpiece, and the one that captures the essence of Burnside's exquisite achievement in poetry, his 2011 collection Black Cat Bone is the one to read. It was awarded the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize, making Burnside one of just four poets to have won both of the UK's most prestigious poetry awards for one book. Black Cat Bone has a mythic, ritualised quality, with a strange ethereality that pushes us, poem by poem, from the brink of the known into a world immanent with spirits and haunting intimations. It repays many, many readings.
In The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Burnside moves through his personal life and those of writers responding to war, political turmoil and environmental damage. This is a book where Burnside shows us how to read, how to live a life formed by reading, how poetry knits its way into our minds. It is also a curiously uplifting, rousing book. 'Hope', he writes, 'is of the essence for all poets. We might even say that to make a poem at all is an act of hope.'
I Put a Spell on You is Burnside's final memoir, though it pushes the bounds of that form. Taking a song as the title for each chapter, it is a book about love, glamour, enchantment and the erotic thrill of the wild. It captures his tenderness and humanity, exploring masculinity and art, the blues, Nina Simone, the Temptations and murder ballads, all the while telling with breathtaking magic how it feels to fall, sumptuously and decadently, in love.
Winner of the Whitbread prize for poetry, Burnside's 2000 collection The Asylum Dance is a lucid, hymn-like series of poems that moves between ideas of home and the urge to leave. There are the lights of fairgrounds, villages, ships at sea. Structured around four longer poems, The Asylum Dance has all of Burnside's trademark visionary music. These poems might require some work, but they wash over you like a fresh salt tide, buoyant, bearing the reader to unexpected, mysterious places of trial and epiphany.
An elegiac evensong of a book, The Empire of Forgetting is Burnside's last collection, and is a resonant demonstration of his lasting power. These are poems of autumn, of the misty woods, of 'ghost lights', wings, the haunting sounds of distant birds. Voices call through the evening dusk, beckoning us home, and though mortality is always present, there is too a sense of rest and the beauty of night-music. Burnside leaves us at dusk: 'Fog on the roads, the harvest gathered in / by lantern-light; our work, if it is work, / accomplished.'
The Empire of Forgetting is now published in paperback by Jonathan Cape alongside reissues of Burnside's memoirs: A Lie About My Father, introduced by Megan Nolan; Waking Up in Toytown, introduced by Sarah Perry; and I Put a Spell on You, introduced by Seán Hewitt. To support the Guardian, order copies at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.