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.
John Burnside is amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Encore Award and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011 he became only the second person to win both the Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes for poetry for the same book, Black Cat Bone. In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. He is a Professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.
FICTION
The Dumb House
The Mercy Boys
Burning Elvis
The Locust Room
Living Nowhere
The Devil’s Footprints
Glister
A Summer of Drowning
Something Like Happy
Ashland & Vine
POETRY
The Hoop
Common Knowledge
Feast Days
The Myth of the Twin
Swimming in the Flood
A Normal Skin
The Asylum Dance
The Light Trap
The Good Neighbour
Selected Poems
Gift Songs
The Hunt in the Forest
Black Cat Bone
All One Breath
NON-FICTION
A Lie About My Father
Waking Up in Toytown
I Put a Spell on You
For Michael Krüger
Si rectum cor tuum esset, tunc omnis creatura speculum vitæ et liber sanctæ doctrinæ esset.
Thomas à Kempis
What we do see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock
And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.
Acts of the Apostles
I’m haunted by the story of a man
who, blind since birth,
was gifted with new sight, his surgeon
pointing out the things he’d only known
by name till then: the roses in a vase,
a window filled with light,
his daughter’s eyes.
One story says
it wasn’t what he’d hoped,
and later, in the house he’d thought so clean
and spacious – dirty now, and cramped –
the birds he used to feed seemed dull
and vulnerable to cats, the photograph
they told him was a portrait of his wife
so ugly, and unlike the voice he’d heard
for years, it seemed
the cruellest of deceits.
Sometimes, they would find him in a makeshift
blindfold, just to have the darkness back,
the world in scent and touch
and measured steps, a theatre of black
to match the black he loved
inside his head.
On moonless nights, he climbed up to the loft
and gazed into the sky above his house,
well-deep and still
and innocent of stars.
When Saul fell from his horse,
it would have seemed
a mishap, nothing more,
to those he rode with.
Some of his companions would have laughed,
then waited
till he got back on his feet
to crack a joke,
but when at last
he rose up from the earth,
he saw no man,
and, troubled now, they led him by the hand
into Damascus.
He lay down in the darkness of himself
three days and nights, then Ananias came
to make him whole
and fill him with the spirit;
but reading of his fall
in Bible class, I liked the man he was
when he was blind,
no longer sure that mastery is all,
still unconvinced
that God would take his side.
I had my doubts
on other matters, too,
mostly the presence of God
in all our lives,
like the five crates of free school milk
in the playground at break,
or the man who came round every week
to collect the insurance.
My mother would offer him tea
and a caramel wafer,
and he would decline, every time,
with a well-tried phrase,
like thanks all the same, or
I’ll have to be getting along.
God was like that, I thought,
though not so polite,
and it did me no good at all
when Sister Veronica
itemised all of the wonders that He had provided
everywhere, designed by His Own Hand.
No poem lovely
as a tree, she said
(though I’d never once thought to compare),
and how, in a world without God, could a boy like me
explain the complex beauty
of the eye?
When Saul was taken out
for execution,
he borrowed a shawl
from someone in the crowd
and covered his face, to have
one moment by himself
before the sword.
Did he whisper goodbye
to the earth, to its scents and winds,
or did he think forward to heaven
and wonder how much difference there is
between the play of sunlight in a stand
of fig-trees
and the light of the hereafter?
When death came
it cut through the flesh,
but left a perfect likeness of his face
indelibly imprinted in the shawl,
so when they held it up
the light shone through,
darkly, at first, like something seen through glass,
but later, when they leaned in,
clear as day.
Eventually, that blind man learned to see
a different world, the finer shades of rain
on stone or asphalt, market traders calling
back and forth, their lamps dimmed
one by one,
the last bus idling softly in its usual
circuit of gold and oil
on Union Road,
streamers of blue
and citrus blown through the scrawl
of blackened thorn around the drying green
where, now, the lines
are empty, office shirts
and blouses taken in
for days that pass like notes played on a scale
in music practice, fields of warmth and shade
ascending, as they must,
to aery nothing.