The Good Neighbour

by John Burnside

From the winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award, the question of how we live together is at the heart of his new collection — the shifting space between “self” and “other,” between solitary experience and the “real world,” where there is no such thing as individual destiny.

Genres: Poetry, Scotland

84 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 2005

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]

felt like we are leading this with sound and that's no complaint. A LOVELY and poetically necessary riff on Frost's Mending Wall which also manages to fulfil the criteria John recently described -

don't tell me about how wonderful nature is
show me something beautiful
or with grace

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely in music and spirit.

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful poetry collection! The Good Neighbour explores relationships between humans and between us and nature, with great insight and a wonderful understanding of the workings of language. The poems are populated by shapeshifting creatures, angels and unidentified beings with:

two spurs of cartilage above

the shoulder blades; not wings,
or not quite wings,
but something like a memory of flight

locked in a chamber of bone

(from Annunciation with Zero Point Field)

and are we all like that if only we would recognise it? Life as a whole here is pervaded by:

that locked sense of robin's egg blue
at the back of a life
that never quite lost its place
in the given script
but wanted, more than anything, to rise
and go out in the dark, to where the owls
were shifting aside, unlocked from the visible world,
and the rain in the trees
was a room at the end of the mind
where what we love goes on, uninterrupted.

(from By Herodsfoot)

This extract speaks to me incredibly powerfully, though I can't articulate why. That is part of the appeal in most of these poems, they capture some aspect of life that you instinctively feel is undefinable, as I read the words I'm thinking 'that is so real' but still wouldn't be able to say what it is.

This is a collection I will read over and over, the poetry is so beautiful and insightful. In fact John Burnside is one of my favourite poets currently writing in Scotland, though in some other of his collections his work imbues nature with too much darkness and the novel of his I read was too disturbing for me to be able to finish! If you only read one book by John Burnside make it The Good Neighbour.