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The Guardian
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review – last words from an essential poet of our age
John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn't appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year. His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world's edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn't that it exists; it's no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it's the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words. It's our great good fortune, then, that Burnside's closing work is also one of his finest. The poems are few in number – just 19 – but there's no impression, often present in posthumous collections, of a structure hastily assembled out of ill-fitting parts. In fact, The Empire of Forgetting is marked both by its coherence – thematic, imagistic and linguistic – and a sense of its fitness. These are poems that deal directly and almost exclusively with mortality. This isn't, of course, new territory for Burnside: his poetry has always been death-haunted, peopled with ghosts. But here the focus has shifted, from the general (loss, religion, afterlife, decay) to the specific. The whole collection is an anticipation of, a grappling with, his own death: 'the darkness-to-come'. In a handful of the poems, he appears to meet the matter head-on. Last Days, with its mentions of 'hospice' and funereal 'white chrysanthemums', offers a vision of 'starlight at the far end of the ward / where time has stopped, the way it sometimes stops / in theatres, when the actors leave the stage'. A little further on, in As If from the End Times, he picks up the word 'last' (which sounds like a bell throughout the collection) and weaves it through the poem, most plangently in the elegiac central stanza, which describes 'Last day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees; / the echo of someone going about / their business, making good or making hay / – you never know for sure, although you know / that something here is coming to an end'. But for the most part, his impending mortality is considered more obliquely, through the twin lenses, familiar to Burnside-watchers, of nature (damaged, depleted, but still sublime) and memory. It is memory – and its shadow, forgetting – to which Burnside keeps circling back in this collection, the space that it takes up here offering a clear and poignant mirror of the space it takes up in our lives as we move past middle age. His mother and father, both frequent presences in his work, take the stage again: the former a locus of endless longing; the latter a baleful 'trail / of Players No 6 and coal-tar soap'. Burnside's writing, particularly in his memoirs, is dominated by his father's bitter legacy, but as he himself draws nearer to the end, it is his mother to whom he turns. In the heart-catching title poem, he leans into poetry's ability to efface time, locating the pair of them in a soft-lit, sweet-scented version of his childhood. 'What if my mother walked home in the grey of morning, one last day', he writes, going on to imagine a reunion that is almost epiphanic, a 'momentary // halcyon of everyone / together, voices, singsong in the dark'. To Burnside the afterlife isn't a voyaging out, but a voyaging in: a route back into the lost past. And this past, when he conjures it, is marked by its externality: it's not the houses and furniture of memory that he craves, but the seasons, the 'evening dusk', the 'quince, or damson, strafed into the grass', 'the field where, once, / we played Dead Man's Fall'. The purity and clarity of nature in the past is counterpointed by the present: 'a ruined / thicket, sump oil / rotting in the grass, a spill / of Roundup in a rut of mud and dock'. This is the Burnside we know: attentive to the degradation of nature; staring it in the face and obliging us to stare at it, too. But in his final collection, more often than not, it's the beauty that possesses him. These are poems filled with songbirds, orchards, 'birch woods', litanies of flowers ('foxgloves, purple / loosestrife, sprawls / of clematis'). The weather is beneficent: sunlight filters, snow drifts and blankets, frost 'performs its secret ministry', there's the sound of 'small rain in the leaves'. The world we see here, through the eyes of a poet at the end of his life, is almost unbearably beautiful – which makes the leave-taking unbearable too. At the heart of the collection is The Memory Wheel, in which Burnside imagines his way into death, and in doing so comes close to writing an epitaph for himself. The poem concludes on the image of a memory: of 'those mornings / when we shivered from our beds / and lit a fire / to magnify the dark'. If Burnside's poetry – all his writing, but his poetry most powerfully of all – can be summed up, it might be like this: a bright light, an illumination that, in its beauty, reveals the depth of the darkness that surrounds us. It's impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age, painfully alive to the glory of what we're losing. Now we've lost him, our Anthropocene spirit guide. A light has gone out. The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside is published by Jonathan Cape (£13). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
CBC
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Remembering Andrea Gibson
Arts ·Commotion Artists Alessandra Naccarato and Syrus Marcus Ware honour the poet's legacy Social Sharing Andrea Gibson was a celebrated poet and spoken word artist who wrote about love, queerness and death. They recently passed away from ovarian cancer. Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with poet Alessandra Naccarato and artist and activist Syrus Marcus Ware about Gibson's impact on poetry and culture at large.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poem of the week: Salt, Snow, Earth by Naomi Foyle
Salt, Snow, Earth Salt bites Snow. Snow slaps Earth. Earth pounds Salt. And so it goes, on and on and on round and round in every shade of hand — claw-teeth, hard palm, fist — Salt, Snow, Earth, Snow, Earth, Salt Bite, Slap, Pound. Slap, Pound, Bite A game to get the blood up. Heart pumping. Skin singing. No breath or time to ask Whose bodies are blanketed? Whose bodies blanked out? What are the odds white wins? Salt & Snow is the title of Naomi Foyle's latest poetry collection. If they haven't done so already, some judging committee somewhere should shortlist it for a significant prize. Impressively varied and agile in form, international in scope, Salt & Snow is as emotionally rich as it is politically alert, drawing strength from its predominant genre, the elegy. The 'in memoriam' poems lament both individuals known privately to the poet, and public 'names' including author and art critic John Berger, poet Lee Harwood and US police murder victim George Floyd. There is no significant difference in Foyle's approach: what particularly distinguishes all the elegies is the depth of imaginative empathy brought to bear on the various lives and deaths. Foyle, who has recovered from cancer, writes not only from the awareness of death as an individual tragedy, especially when 'untimely', but as the common prospect of all organisms. Her visionary prose poem The Dark Earth concludes its life-enhancing list of fruits and flowers, and how to cultivate and eat them, with their horrific metamorphosis into dangerous threats: 'Should they persist, hack with knives and machetes, chop down and string up, beat with bats, iron bars, hurl from tall towers, crush, burn, behead. Ditch their remains in the earth you call dirt.' This poem has an unusual dedication: 'i.m. all those cut down due to their nature' and it expresses another essential theme of the collection, the political creation of the enemy who justifies the forces of destruction. This week's poem adds 'earth' to the 'salt' and 'snow' of the title and the title poem. The latter is one of the 'public' elegies, written in memory of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, the child who was 'poisoned with salt' by his mother and whose death became an impossible subject of conversation: 'Our silence / is a coverlet / of snow // on a looted grave – // white as salt.' These images are scattered across the book's main section. Salt is especially significant and takes various forms: it's the ammonium nitrate ('that white synthetic salt') which exploded with devastating effect in a Beirut warehouse on 4 August 2020, and also a vital ingredient in the 'bottle of Tajín' which George Floyd's ex-girlfriend was keeping for the meal they hoped to share on their 'first post-lockdown meet-up'. Snow, Salt, Earth initially enacts a process of stripping down. The symbolic substances are introduced in brief sentences, stating the effect of one upon the other, anaphora emphasising the chant of a 'game'. The effects are not necessarily negative: salt is useful for melting snow, snow may 'slap' earth without destroying it, salt is vitally important to life. But the implicit metaphor of a relentless game develops in the tercet: 'And so it goes, on and on and on / round and round in every shade of hand …' The hand then shape-shifts into various weapons: '— claw-teeth' (suggesting the cruelty of fingernails), 'hard palm, fist —'. Now syntax is abandoned: the pace accelerates as the couplet divides, as if in a battle with itself, into a line of nouns and a line of verbs, percussive monosyllables belted out like punches. If this were a sonnet (I'm leaving the interpretation open), verse three would mark an upheaval of a 'turn'. Subsequently the speaker, perhaps not wholly ironically, shows violence becoming exciting and addictive. Words are put together again, though not yet as full sentences: 'A game to get the blood up. / Heart pumping. Skin singing.' Formal grammar restored, the questions there will be 'no breath or time to ask' occupy the final tercet. It makes a clear distinction between the snow that 'blankets' and somehow comforts a surface, and the snow that erases it, 'blanks' it. That surface implicitly becomes a scene of annihilation: it may be a political arena in which the crimes of a state against its people are concealed and those who ask questions are disappeared. As if exhausted by what it has enacted, the poem now seems to drop a tone in pitch, into the angry sarcasm of despair: 'What are the odds white wins?' The whiteness left on the page provides the only answer to the question. I was struck by the uncanny prescience of that line when I re-read the collection a few months ago. It was coincidentally after I'd watched the video of the confrontation between presidents Zelenskyy and Trump over the future of Ukraine. Trump had told Zelenskyy, 'You don't have the cards right now', and Zelenskyy replied: 'We're not playing cards.' 'You're gambling with World War Three,' Trump insisted. The memory of that snarling battle over a familiar metaphor immediately rose in my mind when I re-read Salt, Snow, Earth, giving the poem's conclusion a strong additional thrust. This resonance persists with the daily reminders of the 'gambling' element in missile-strikes, for instance, which are often not as predictable as claimed. The line has a further significance as a reminder of the 'supremacist' racial assumptions behind war. Salt, Snow, Earth has been re-imagined as the compelling 'poemfilm' below in a collaboration between Razia Aziz, Wendy Pye and the poet herself. Their work combines exciting vocal and instrumental sounds, brilliantly woven imagery and some stunning physical theatre.
CBC
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Guelph author Melinda Burns uses poetry to connect to her Indigenous roots
The medicine wheel is a sacred symbol in many Indigenous cultures. It represents the four seasons and how each is associated with different aspects of life, growth and teachings. For Guelph author Melinda Burns, it served as a way for her to reclaim and celebrate her heritage. And she does this through a collection of poetry found in her recently released book Homecoming. Her poems are grouped according to the directions found on the medicine wheel. Each section reflects both the universal human journey of growth and learning, and the author's personal experiences. Burns recently sat down with CBC K-W's The Morning Edition host Craig Norris to talk more about the book. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Audio of the interview can be found at the bottom of this article. Craig Norris: The poems you wrote represent the four directions of the medicine wheel. For those who aren't familiar with what each direction means, could you walk us through them? Melinda Burns: I t's a symbol in Native American spirituality of wholeness and balance, and it's a circle that's divided into four quadrants. The east is for beginnings, spring, morning, starting out. The south is for summer and the afternoon adolescence of life. And that represents innocence and joy. The west is autumn and evening, and it has to do with loss, but also introspection. And then the north is for winter and for the ancestors and old age. And it has to do with wisdom. Norris: How does your poetry correlate with the wheel? Burns: When I was starting to put this collection together, I was trying to think of how to order the poems that I've written over a long time. So there were poems for my childhood and growing up and my relationship with my mother, marriage, motherhood. And when I thought of doing it chronologically, it just didn't seem quite right. And when I hit on the idea of arranging them according to the medicine wheel, it really presented a sense of wholeness in a life. In the east there are many beginnings, not just the beginning of our life. And in the south there are many joys, not just the joys and wonder of childhood. And of course many losses and the need to go within to understand them. And also a lot of gathering of wisdom over the years as we live and as we connect with our ancestors. Norris: As you've been writing and compiling these poems, what has that done for you personally, as you continue your own journey of reclaiming your heritage? Burns: Well, it is an ongoing journey. I called the book Homecoming from the very beginning because it's about the journey that all of us make to come home to ourselves, to who we're meant to be and who we really are. So there was a double impact for me. One was just compiling the poems and getting to see my life [and having] that feeling of wholeness, that everything fits, that nothing is good or bad or right or wrong, it is just part of the cycle. But the other part certainly was about putting it out as a native person claiming this very rich heritage that I didn't get to know about from my mother because of her connection to residential schools and her distancing from our heritage. Norris: What has your poetry helped you to learn about yourself? Burns: I really do think poetry helps us learn a great deal about ourselves. There's a quote from Rumi at the beginning of the book that says: 'Through love, all pain will turn to medicine.' And I think it's helped me to see how true that is, that when we, when I approach my life with love, with everything that's happened in it, the highs and lows, the joys and losses, that it does turn to medicine and in the sense that it strengthens and fortifies me. Norris: Could you share a poem with us? Burns: I have one that I wrote some years ago, and you might recognize this particular festival this is referring to... Norris: What do you hope people take away from your collection of poetry? Burns: I hope that they can relate to each section as they read it. So there's four sections and then the centre, which is the place of mystery and the creator. And that as they read my poems in those sections, they think about their own beginnings and their own joys and their own losses and times of going within and their own wisdom that they've acquired. And that it helps them to see their lives in this sense of wholeness rather than that linear idea of birth on the left and death on the right and trying to get somewhere in between. That there's really no place we need to get. We're just always circling the mystery. And I hope that's a comfort to people. Norris: What's next for you? Burns: A couple of things I'd love to mention. The French edition of the book is coming out in 2026, which is just amazing to me to be able to see my poems in another language. I'll be reading at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival this year. It's on Sept, 7 and right now the The Hillside Festival poem is in a poetry and art rotating exhibit at The Boathouse in Guelph, and the exhibit is going to feature poems and artwork that is inspired by the poems [in Homecoming ].
BBC News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Farnworth teensagers 'inspired' by Mancunian performance poet
"Poetry can validate young people and give them a voice." That was the message to pupils at a secondary school in Bolton, Greater Manchester, who say they have been "inspired" to express themselves through poetry after a visit from a Mancunian poet Mike Garry said he wanted to "empower young people and make them see the world differently".He spoke to English students at St James' C of E High School in Farnworth about the power of reading."It's important for young people to realise than not all poets are dead," he said. Garry added: "They need to hear a voice which is familiar in sound and music to theirs."They need to hear poems that speak about the places they know or at least heard of. "They need to see their lives and experiences in poetry. It validates them. "It says, 'your voice is important and so is your world'." St James' Year 10 student Tumukunde said she felt poetry was a way of expressing the "deeper meaning of life", adding that "a big message can be said with very few words". Garry had "made it make sense",15-year-old Oren said. "He solidified everything I've been told about reading."Jayden, 15, said the poetry "spoke to us and not at us".Oliver, 15, was impressed by the "energy" which comes from performance poetry and Eden, 15, said it had been "inspirational". Head of English at St James' Victoria Kilgour said she felt "words are power" for her students. "Through reading, our young people can be empowered to express their feelings, speak their desires, challenge their thinking and that of others and break barriers." Garry graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University with a degree in Library and Information Studies and went on to work as a librarian for 15 years before becoming a 2015, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan in recognition of his commitment to promoting reading and literacy in young people throughout the work with young people in Manchester has also won him awards from the Prince's Trust and the National Literacy Trust. Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.
