Gift Songs

by John Burnside

To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song’s goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to "labour to make the way of God your own," Shaker artists expressed an aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion, attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to become bamboo. In his 10th collection, John Burnside begins with an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a free church—where faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible credo, but in the indefinable—and moves on through explorations of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere , the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an ordered world. The book closes with a series of meditations on place, entitled "Four Quartets," intended both as a spiritual response to the string quartets of Bartók and Britten (as Eliot’s were to Beethoven’s late quartets), and as an experiment in the poetic form that the finest of poets, the true miglior fabbro , chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in this collection are true thrillingly beautiful, charged with power and mystery, each imbued with the generous skills of a master of his craft.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

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

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

. Lyric, meaning and brilliant diction combine in the poems of John Burnside, one of our finest modern poets. I’ll quote an example. From La Briere.

“It turns out, what we thought of as the soul
Is mostly sound;
Not song, but like a memory of birds
Or running water,
The churn of a paddle, the flicker and dip
Of an oar,
Narrow boats butting the land
on their quiet tethers.”

Or the whole of Wanderlust

“Last day of harbour;
Rain, and the lull of gospel

Clouding the sweet hiatus
Of home and kirk.

Mice in the oat-bin,
Honey bees snagging the nets,

And, slowly,
From the stockyards in the town,

The scent of beasts arrives;
The biblical;

Rudderless gazes
Turned to a farmer’s sky.”

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

a monument !and completes my john reading

we are labouring over absence more than usual. no complaint. shots skewed towards eliot. more arctic than john usually is and that man looks to inherit the arctic

[Jonathan Alvarez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lamento no tener las bases culturales necesarias para entender la propuesta de Burnside. Sin embargo, he aprendido algunas cosas sobre el bagaje cultural escocés y su relación con el protestantismo. Me he llevado también algunos poemas que seguramente se convertirán en epígrafes de algunos textos.

[Jorge · Rating 4 out of 5]

De mejillas sonrosadas y sonrisa imperturbable, a John Burnside lo conocimos en un Cosmopoética en el que el escocés no renunció a beber. Burnside agota el léxico católico en este libro, tal vez porque "at night, my wife lies down/ among the saints,". Libro lleno de muertos y de nieblas, de copitos de nieve y de lanchas marinas, de fantasmas.