Since his early work in The Hoop John Burnside has been producing poetry of strange beauty and perception. A poet keenly alert to the "atmospheric tricks" of the world, he has, to use his own words, been tuned into "the plainsong of the stars", as well as "the painful gravity that comes of being settled on the earth". His poetry embodies that Orphic quality once described by the Hungarian poet Sandor Weores as the ability to "penetrate the substance of things".
Now his delicate but firmly-knit lyricism has further evolved to the point of cogency, lucidity and economy arrived at in this outstanding new volume. Certainly there is nothing of what that perceptive critic Calvin Bedient once described as the "imaginative barrenness" of British poetry in the work of Burnside (Larkin was, I think, the target of that comment). Burnside possesses resourceful and imaginative powers of suggestion.
His is a ruminative mind, moving through a landscape that is both an interior one and made up of a real and local terrain. Indeed, he is a poet with a unique sense of landscape and its metamorphoses, whether they are mythical, mythological or mystical.
His landmarks and boundaries coalesce into the poetic imagination, giving it its colouring and sustenance. But it is the human significance he bestows on these landscapes that makes his work so compelling. These qualities have never been shown to better effect than in the beautifully-cadenced sequence of poems ("Ports", "Settlements", "Fields and Roads") that forms the backbone of this collection.
The central preoccupation of these pieces is "the pull and sway of home". The words "dwelling place" occur again and again; the homing instinct (in the poem "Geese" we are presented with "bodies surging on towards the light") is almost a supernatural force.
Burnside's voice is often one of detached serenity, but his compassionate eye takes in a familiar topography: sea towns and market towns with their kirks and harbours (a recurring image) - their navigators and pilots always in view.
From here amongst the angel-headed stones
we see the town entire:
the shiplike kirk
the snooker hall above the library
the gift-shop on the corner
windows packed with trinkets of glass
and pictures of towns like this
This fragmentary, loose and open style is a device that, in less capable hands, might drift and flutter away into a disjointed or diffuse kind of poetry. Here it is lean and taut, shot through with a music of graceful limpidity; the short lines, studded with simple but effective imagery, act to heighten the epiphanous quality that has always marked his work.
The chemistry of his poetry tends to be a combination of observation and introspection; and while a sense of the mystery of the world, of its otherness, is always present there is, too, an Eliot-like philosophical concentration at the heart of the poem.
Central to the form of his poetry is a mingling of the sacred and the secular. This religious sensibility (though not in any strict theological sense) produces an unease with the world; he is fully alert to "the prayers that stay unanswered". Like Eliot - and Stevens - he can be both allusive and elusive.
A Burnside poem is often uncomfortable and unsettling in its nuance, tension and gravity: never more so than in "Fields", a sequence which, like the brooding work in his collection "Swimming in the Flood", emerges from the darker hinterland of the imagination.
The troubled spirit of the painter Edvard Munch looms over a number of the poems: two of them are "after Munch" - "The Dance of Life" and "Arrival of the Mail Boat", with its wonderful opening lines:
It takes us years to understand the colours of perpetual return
Some of the imagery that weaves itself into the magnificent title poem "The Asylum Dance" makes more than a nod in the direction of the scene depicted in the painter's "Dance of Life". All this seems appropriate since the poet is, as much as the painter was, haunted by the landscape of the soul.
Gerard Smyth is a poet. His next collection is forthcoming from Dedalus. He is also a Managing Editor of The Irish Times
