Still Life With Feeding Snake

by John Burnside

From our earliest childhood experiences, we learn to see the world as contested space: a battleground between received ideas, entrenched conventions and myriad Authorised Versions on the one hand, and new discoveries, terrible dangers, and everyday miracles on the other. As we grow, that world expands further, to include new species, lost continents, the realm of the dead and the lives of others: cosmonauts swim in distant space, unseen creatures pass through a garden at dusk; we are surrounded by delectable mysteries.

The question of this contested, liminal world sits at the centre of Still Life with Feeding Snake, whose poems live at the edge of loss, or on the cusp of epiphany, always seeking that brief instant of grace when we see what is before us, and not just what we expected to find. In ‘Approaching Sixty’, the poet watches as a woman unclasps her hair: ‘so the nape of her neck/is visible, slender and pale/for moments, before the spill/of light and russet/falls down to her waist’. This, like each poem in the book, becomes an essay in still life and a memento mori, illuminating transient experience with a profound clarity and a charged, sensual beauty.

Genres: Poetry

93 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

John Burnside was a Scottish writer. He was the author of nine collections of poetry and five works of fiction. Burnside achieved wide critical acclaim, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes. He left Scotland in 1965, returning to settle there in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. Laterly, he lived in Fife with his wife and children and taught Creative Writing, Literature and Ecology courses at the University of St. Andrews.

[Author photo © Norman McBeath]

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I mentioned somewhere in my notes that these are poems that sparkle across one another in their internals. I've been thinking a lot about Burnside's technicals with this collection which is naturally exquisite and seems to run along Lear and Little Gidding among the natural others.

In poems like Sirens he's developed something elusive that I think is the sort of thing one only cares or thinks about if you're as neurotic as me. Strangely enough it's a technique not too far - though miles-apart thinkers in every sense - from the better moments of Paul Muldoon, who can make his poems speak among themselves, rhyming across twenty or thirty pages (or, memorably, mapping the rhymes of one collection onto the next, necessitating them to be read together. Genius marketing if nowt else). Anyway, I delay because I don't know what to call it for John. Sirens in neat tercets which I was halfway inclined to call terzas. I quote my usually inscrutable notes:
"note the not rhyme but /chimes. Attention to plosive 'd', 't' in their transference [which generates that extraordinarily rare technique of consonantal rhyme]. Tense too, in 'yard' to 'year', 'drop' to 'dripping'."

As I say I don't know whether that can suit an umbrella name. But it's remarkable and demonstrates a clutch of the poem from the inside. I don't think it's pure intuition either - this is a mechanic at work just as much as an artist. Anyway exquisite collection John I just wonder about these things

[Emily Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I both really enjoyed these and also came away unsatisfied. I think the skeleton of the poems set them up for more interesting reveals, in terms of language used, and then when you got to the “reveal” bit, it was a cliche or otherwise predictable and I found that a little bit frustrating. Perhaps it was the repetition of metaphor (snow, space, light). But on the other hand I appreciated the simplicity of language. Don’t know. Need to let it percolate for a little bit.

For sure did not know what all those cosmonauts were doing in there — felt out of place next to religious / ceremonial / richer imagery of church and still life.

[VG · Rating 3 out of 5]

Melancholy, beautifully crafted poetry. This is my first collection of Burnside’s work, and it took a while to settle into the flow. Once I did, I particularly enjoyed ‘George and the Dragon’, ‘Mistaken for a Unicorn’, ‘Pluviose’, ‘Crane-Watching’ and ‘To the Snow Queen’, many of which harken back to the darker impulses of childhood and the role of nature in our lives. Unfortunately, I could not connect as much with some of the other poems, but I look forward to picking up more of Burnside’s collections in the future.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Burnside's 'Still Life With Feeding Snake', a mercurial collection concerned with everything from the serpent underground to the suffocating astronauts in far reaches of space, always with a keen eye on surprising, serpentine twists of language...

[David]

There are some viscerally gripping lines and phrases in Burnside's poetry.

[Juliana · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book wasn’t for me, though I really enjoyed the last bit on immigration.

[Rosamund · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been relishing this collection over the last week. There are many poems here that merit repeated reading. Burnside is master of bold language, strong images but subtle ideas.

[Giovana · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Sarah]

Saltire Society awards shadow panel reading