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The poem, by John Burnside:

Lady in the Snow, by Kuniyasu

A prostitute, in fact.

                                   We know this
by the rush mat under her arm
                                                              and by the way
her sash is tied.

The snow has been falling all day
in thick
               slow
                           waves

filling the gaps between the young bamboos

blurring the lanternlight behind her with a scuffed
white fur.

She must be cold:
she is shielding her face from the wind
and her feet are naked in the high
wood sandals
                           which leave a trail
of blue-black chevrons on the narrow path
like crow's-feet
                              or the blocked calligraphy
that hides an artist's name and printer's mark

amongst the grey-green spikes
of winter leaves.
  

The response, by David Boll:

A glance at the title and it looks as if we're in for Japanoiserie.  Those Geishas again.  All that hair - coiffure, one should say, with so many pins.  Elegance of course, but are we really interested?

Only she's not a geisha.  A tart, in fact.  And she can't be very elegant if she's clumping around stockingless in clogs in the snow and carting her mat under her arm.  She's cold, shielding her face from the wind.

Nor is she the only thing in the picture, as geishas in prints are often poised against a neutral background.  There is snow

The snow has been falling all day
in thick
             slow
                     waves

and this snow is really seen - seen by the artist and then in turn by the poet

...scuffed
white fur

And along with the sight of snow comes its silence.  It is there in the spaces in the poem, the indented lines, the pauses, the white paper left blank.  The movement is very characteristic of Burnside - there is a slowing down, a sinking in.  His Presiding Spirits  describes how he finds so much he can draw from Robert Lowell, yet the movement of his verse is quite different from the urgency and drama of Lowell's. It is not surprising that he speaks of affinities with the East.  His poetry has itself a Japanese quality - less is more, the space around objects enhances them while clutter diminishes.  These qualities in Japanese art derive ultimately from meditation, from becoming quieter, from reduction, simplification.  It is there in gardens - one stone in a sea of gravel like one thought in silence.  It contrasts with our gluttonous clamorous culture, not least of course in modern Japan itself.  So Burnside in his poetry pauses, slows, and notices what is there. 

Other things equally seen, the "blue-black chevrons on the narrow path / like crow's feet", the "grey-green spikes / of winter leaves".  But this is more complex than it may seem at first sight.  The stylised "blocked calligraphy" of the spikes echoes the calligraphy of the footprints left by her wooden shoes, and at the same time "hides an artist's name and printer's mark".

And things felt - an evident sympathy which does not need to say it is sympathetic - that is implicit in what is recorded.

So this picture is something created and brought together out of disparate elements - prostitute, snow, sympathy, footprints, calligraphy, leaves, the hidden name.

Proust wrote in a letter about how he distrusted the beauty aspired to by the Parnassian poets of his time - "essentially a privileged beauty, the beauty of certain things, and not of others, and hence the non-beauty of things in themselves, of life in itself".  This is a manifesto of modernism before modernism was named.   So here, the beauty is something created, not an elegant record of elegance, of the accepted beauty of a geisha.

And the artist's name is hidden.  This picture is not about him.   He remains in the background.  He is there in the whole painting, his creation, he does not need to assert himself beyond that.  As Burnside is in the background, writing about someone else's work of art, yet in a poem that is wholly Burnside.

The unexpectedness of Japanese tea cups.  Asymmetrical, thick, botched - cracked, even.  Not your Chinese Sung Dynasty shapeliness.  Yet they say so much in their apparent rudimentariness.  Their character - robust, workmanlike, strong, concentrated.  We do not miss anything because they cannot hold forth about themselves.  They are themselves in what they are.

Our own culture is such that we sometimes like to think of poetry as confessional, the uttering of secrets. As against that - not incompatible with it, but a different emphasis - there is also poetry, and art, as the making of things.

It also comes naturally to us to write about the incidents of our day to day lives, which gives our poetry an immediacy but also at times a narrowness.  John Burnside's work may serve to remind us that these incidents themselves, such as the walk on a pier with his child which he describes in Presiding Spirits or his looking at a Japanese print, may lead us beyond ourselves into the context of life as a whole on our planet, or to the stretch of human experience in different times and places.