Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This book, dominated by gravity and light, with several references to physis (including the Greek literation), is centred on where the mind ends and materiality begins.

     One has the impression of a persona looking into the abyss of mysticism, in a conflict of intellectual doubts and inducements, not quite able to take the step out into the void, yet suddenly finding he’s actually standing in emptiness: both space and time are creations of his own perceptive apparatus.

     Listening to a blackbird, he’s waiting “for some new gaze / to reinvent the sky”. One is reminded of Wordsworth having to hold onto a tree to reassure himself it was solid. I’m also reminded of Rilke - there’s at least one allusion to him - and Wallace Stevens, who began as an atheistic mystic and ended up a Roman Catholic. Burnside began as a Catholic and aspires to “regain a pre-Christian, pagan sensibility”. The lines are mostly short and sometimes fragmented, resembling HD for instance, and gather impressions and evanescent thoughts into a chain of reflection. Beginning with actual fireflies, he goes on to see fireflies as the particles of light we and the rest of the universe are. Facing the possibility that “when the story ends” we might be metamorphosed into something else - “another light unfolding in another type of brain” - he’s ready to “wander in the certainties of grass/ and buttercups, unsure of what we are” ready for new becoming.

     There is perhaps a little too much abstraction, but the book centres on the concrete: field mice, a lapwing’s egg, deer, moths, a seal in the harbour, jamjars of spawn and sticklebacks. They’re not very closely observed: a little more influence from imagism (or Rilke’s Neue Gedichte) would benefit the imagination and writing.

     Burnside’s previous book won the Whitbread Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot and Forward prizes.