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John Burnside: The Asylum Dance. London: Cape, £8.00.
John Burnside: Animals and Angels. 3 South Street, Sheepwash, Beaworthy, Devon: Maquette, £5.00.

     I had a Belgian Philosophy lecturer who, when questioned about some of the slightly counter-intuitive ideas of the pre-Socratics, chastised students for being British Empiricists. It was meant as a joke, but served to highlight the longstanding division that exists between the empirical and analytic traditions of British philosophy and that far less empirically based continental variety. With this in mind it is interesting to find a quotation from Heidegger in the front of John Burnside’s The Asylum Dance, a collection which seems very much rooted to empiricism. As well as the quotation, we’ve already encountered the Heideggerian-sounding “Urlicht” by page two and later the image of “the light in a gap between trees” (‘The Hay Devil’), which brings to mind Heidegger’s use of the same image – he calls it “lichtung” – when exploring the nature of being.

     The overriding theme of this collection – covered in four sequences entitled ‘Ports’, ‘Settlements’, ‘Fields’ and ‘Roads’ – is that of place and home. Indeed, that quotation from Heidegger is about this theme. In a typically Heideggerian fashion he seems to suggest that home can be found in the actual quest for home: “man still does not even think of the proper plight of dwelling as the plight.” Certainly the poems here are primarily concerned with the difficulty of defining place and home: “here we have nothing to go on/ or nothing more/ than light and fog/ a shiver in the wind” (‘Ports’). This sense of doubt and intangibility is extended to our experience of the world at large when, later in this sequence, a photographer realises he cannot capture the essence (the being?) of his subject with his lens: “but couldn’t take/ the picture he wanted/ the one he thinks of now/ as perfect”.

     In order to emphasise all this Burnside gives many of the poems here a fractured structure, with lines even broken by parts of sequences themselves:

              I knew the explanation for this strange
phenomenon
                     but hadn’t guessed till then
how sweet it is: almost to disappear
rising a little
                  or flaring towards the light
with every spinning clutch
of windblown grass

III

and later
              in the uneventful dusk
we drove out to a field beyond the town
and wandered the riverbank
                                         (‘The Hay Devil’)

However, while Burnside sets himself the tasks of casting doubt on that which feels like an empirical certainty and of then trying to transcend it, he operates poetically in a highly empirical fashion, rather like the camera lens of his photographer. Empirical doubt and transcendence are explored via the qualities of coastal Scottish communities – fog or tides feature heavily and there is plenty of snow blanking out the world. Yet these are still empirical experiences. Indeed, many of the poems here are overtly concerned with the power of sense data. There is even a poem entitled ‘Sense Data’ which deals with the deaf 18th Century Astronomer John Goodricke. ‘A Smoke’ focuses squarely on a cigarette’s sensory pleasures, its nicotine’s “mineral kiss”. ‘Desserts’ deals with the way in which taste conjures the memory of childhood: “my body is wired/ to the flavours/ of childhood:/ aniseed/ and mint/ and something sharp/ or incompletely sweetened/ like the stalks/ of rhubarb we would cut from old/ allotments/ dipped/ in stolen sugar/ reddled at the lips.”

     There might be scope here for criticism of Burnside in having aspirations to address notions of doubting and transcending the empirical world and yet relying so heavily on it. Perhaps he should have prefaced his book with a quotation from a phenomenologist like Husserl, to whose philosophy one might suspect this poetry would be more suited. However, the collection creates a sense of tension rather than a sense of contradiction or failure. Indeed,this tension is addressed in the section of ‘Fields’ entitled ‘Otherlife’. It begins with attempts to transcend the empirical: “Be quick when you switch on the light/ and you¹ll see the dark/ was how my father put it:/ catch/ the otherlife of things/ before a look/ immerses them.” The poem ends with quite the opposite conclusion, with the poet stuck in, “the known world about me”.

     In the second and smaller of these collections, Animals and Angels, this tension is more overt and seems to be explored further. The very title suggests this by invoking both the earthly and the heavenly. This collection is prefaced by a quotation from Lucretius, whose poem ‘On the Nature of Things’ sets out the Philosophy of Epicurus – a deeply materialistic one ­ which was later revived by Pierre Gassendi and was then an influence on that arch-empiricist John Locke. Indeed, there is a poem, ‘After Lucretius’, which struggles with the difficulties of empiricism, related materialism and their transcendence: “and if we are the fleshed/ and perishable shadows of a soul/ that shifts and slides/ beneath this every day// appearance, we are bound/ by greenness and decay to see ourselves/ each in the other, staying/ and turning aside.”

     In Animals and Angels the focus is more on the self rather than place: “They say, if you dream an animal, it means// ‘the self’ – that mess of memory and fear/ that wants, remembers, understands, denies” (‘Animals’). Heidegger is still the presiding spirit, and there is even a poem sharing the title of his most famous work, ‘Being and Time’, in which, as in many of these poems, existential epiphanies occur via a reflection on childhood: “There are times when I think/ of the knowledge we had as children:/ the patterns we saw in number, or the spells/ and recipes we had/ for love and fear;// the knowledge we kept in the bones/ for wet afternoons/ the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog.” Once again, as well as those tides and that fog, snow features heavily – in nearly every poem – to create that atmosphere of uncertainty.

     If this all sounds a bit of a brain-ache for those unfamiliar with philosophy, or off-putting to those who agree with Keats’s idea about clipped wings, there’s little reason to worry. Burnside’s achievement is that in keeping a foothold in our experience of our world while exploring the deeper questions about what lies beyond that and the very essence of that world, he has written lucid and engaging poems. They do not lapse into woolly philosophical pondering. He turns his empirical tendency to his advantage, keeping that camera lens sharply focused and steady.

     Moreover, there are other, more conventional themes here. For example, in The Asylum Dance, there is the theme of loss, as in the touching ‘Blues’. And there’s the quirky title poem which deals with an annual village dance with the inmates of the local asylum and goes on to become a poem about love and isolation when one of the villagers falls for an inmate. Even that poem ‘Other Life’, which grapples with those larger philosophical tensions, is about the loss of a father, and has a much wider appeal than simply to those interested in philosophy. In essence, while these poems do have complex philosophical underpinnings, Burnside manages to make them approachable and universal. If the waters are deep, the boat ride is pleasant and has some great scenery.