The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review: 'evades final conclusions'
Although it reflects his longstanding concerns with haunting and mortality, this posthumous collection of poems by John Burnside uses a lighter palette than some of his previous work, writes Stuart Kelly
It is understandably tempting, but would be fundamentally wrong, to read this posthumous collection of John Burnside’s poetry as a kind of last word. It is not a pre-emptive epitaph. The atmosphere, the particular tropes and obsessions, have been part of his poetic lexicon for some time. It is not as if he has suddenly become concerned with haunting; it is not as if the glories of the physical world were not always momentary and marbled with mortality in his previous work.
What is perhaps a subtle change of key is that this is no longer tinged with the demonic or furious. Although a changeling and a devil lurk in the first poem, the palette is lighter. Burnside knew the difference between a metaphor and a simile. The opening stanza of “Notes Towards a Devotio Moderna” rests on a statement – “we are patient to the last” – but it is bolstered by “as if” and “like medieval pilgrims”: the speaker is not, actually, a pilgrim, nor is there “a sky where we could / pause a while”. The poem is a sharp negating until the blunt “we have the dead” – and note, that this is a “we” not an “I” – and a quiet wink at TS Eliot with “we have // rats in the attic, chipped bowls full of eggs, / but no one here has miracles to tell” – and then, a sharp twist: “or not, that is, beyond the simple fact / of birch woods, or the first snow of the year”.
Burnside always was good at pulling away the carpet (or table-cloth) and leaving specifics. He was also a master at delay and rhythmic stretching – the reader is made to wait for the fact of birch woods. Years ago, I heard the critic Terry Eagelton on Channel 4 berating the work of Philip Larkin (as sour, pleasureless, that worst of all things, conservative) and quoting his poem “Reasons for Attendance” and missing out the final, crushing line “If no-one has misjudged himself. Or lied.” (I think that first full stop one of the glories of poetry). In the case of “Towards a…” the reader is given “one last / warbler”, but then “a warbler in the dusk”, then “an owl, first / one thing, then the next”. The poem evades final conclusions and answers. If this is Burnside’s last word, typically, he has it and eschews it.
Burnside was not a religious poet, nor was he spiritual – he would have lamped anyone giving such an empty description. He was insistent that the material world was and yet was not all. This is still a poetry of “marrowfat / and yarrow”, or (in the title poem) “forced chrysanthemums / and sugared plums”. The poem has a flash of a fleeting eternity – an epiphany if you wish, of “that momentary / halcyon of everyone / together”, and “halcyon” is not just an echt-poetic word, but a word that Burnside, always the canny ornithologist, would know was Greek for kingfisher, a bird that exemplifies swift glimpses and was thought to gift calm.
The poems conjure and disavow – “it might have been a puzzle, or a form / or absence we had yet to comprehend”. The “darkness-to-come”, mentioned in the respectful foreword, is the “always already”, the “immer schon” of Heidegger (I am sure Burnside would bluff he did not know that: the fact the poem begins “when all the books are gone” is like a tiny goad). This book ends with notes, and yet an obvious quote is omitted – “the frost performs its secret ministry”, in “Winter Sutra”, is from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”. It might – particularly in its connection to kind if erratic fatherhood – be very intentional indeed.
Burnside, I think, returned to concepts and images precisely because he did not feel he had had the last word or finally captured the essence of existing: to quote him, “aporia as modus operandi”. Of the three long poems, I almost wish “Variations on ‘The Ruin’” had been the last. The Ruin is the title given to an Anglo-Saxon poem about ruins, where the manuscript itself is ruined and fragmentary. Burnside has his version evaporating into the German word “ewig”, forever.
There is, as Burnside writes, “no remedy for loss, no / cure for rot, / no solace to be found / in mere ideas.” But appropriately the same poem has “tatters of féerique”, something glanced and gone and strange and inexplicable.
The Empire of Forgetting, by John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, £13
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