Where to start with John Burnside
Seán Hewitt guides readers through John Burnside’s landmark works, in poetry & prose
10/10
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/11/where-to-start-with-john-burnside
When we are gone
our lives will continue without us
– or so we believe and,
at times, we have tried to imagine …
—“Afterlife” by John Burnside (1955–2024)
published in GIFT SONGS (Jonathan Cape, 2007)
9/10
“Borderlands are sites of mystery, but they are also theatres where, as often as not, tragedy unfolds… where the dead still linger and the living come, on special occasions, to grieve.”
—“Borderlands”, by John Burnside
8/10
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2012/05/borderlands-by-john-burnside/
If there is any sensation that is better than walking to the edge of a settlement – a town on the road, a lonely filling station, the huddle of cabins and steam on the highway through the Argentine pampas where, long ago, some friends and I stopped one night, on the way to Entre Rios, […]
“Like Rilke, John managed to be earthy while expanding our imaginative reach into the angelic orders. His poems acted on one like a drug… one might emerge blinking and wondering, ‘Where have I just been?’”
—Kathleen Jamie on John Burnside
7/10
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/06/john-burnsides-soul-music
Had I been less prepared, I would have left
in springtime, when the plum tree in the yard
was still in bloom,
the windows open after months of snow,
one magpie in the road
and then another…
—John Burnside, “The Night Ferry”
Published in the London Review of Books, December 2020
6/10
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n24/john-burnside/the-night-ferry
“Burnside’s work has always been about moments of transformation, or change, the endlessly metamorphic adaptability of human identity… solitude & silence bring one back to the world”
—David Borthwick explores solitude & silence in the work of John Burnside
5/10
If I could catch the feeling I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world — Virginia Woolf In a recent essay, John Burnside describes the experience of being lost in the north Norwegian tundra. Having strayed from the markers of a […]
“THE DUMB HOUSE is a wonderfully disturbing book – chillingly focused and lyrically amoral with moments of remarkable stillness and beauty”
John Burnside wrote 11 novels. Ian Scott at the National Library of Scotland looks at his first: THE DUMB HOUSE (1997)
4/10
https://blog.nls.uk/john-burnsides-first-novel-the-dumb-house/
It gets late early out here
in the lacklustre places,
wind in the trees and the foodstalls’
ricepaper lamplight, fading and blurred with rain…
—John Burnside, “Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012”
published in BLACK MIDDENS: New Writing Scotland 31 (ASL, 2013)
3/10
“I think John was drawn to that notion of a conjured charm or presence that came from the spirit-world… He told me once that poetry was, for him, a form of alchemy.”
—Robin Robertson reflects on the life & work of John Burnside for the Poetry Foundation
2/10
“Scottishness is as much myth as it is history, which means that we must guard it carefully, retell it beautifully &, more than anything else, love it wisely”
John Burnside (1955–2024) was born #OTD, 19 March. His career as an author & poet spanned nearly 40 years
1/10
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/07/in-search-of-a-homeland
#Scottish #literature #poetry #novels #JohnBurnside #Scottishness #ScottishIdentity
Assoc for Scottish Literature
